Great time to space out in the home
No matter the size of your home, it always feels like space is at a premium.
There are a lot of reasons why you may have outgrown your current home, but that doesn’t mean moving is an option at this time.
Maybe you have a new addition on the way, or perhaps a partner just moved in with you and you’re trying to fit two homes worth of things into one. It’s always a challenge, but it’s not impossible to carve out some much needed extra space out of your home.
Once you’ve donated the things you don’t need anymore (and we all have that stuff lying around), here are a few ways to make it feel like you’ve added square footage to your home.
Making space to play
Kids accumulate a lot of clutter — toys, books, clothes — and it adds up. Having raised three children of my own, I found the best way to keep it from exploding around the rest of the home is to dedicate a play space for Jr.
If you don’t have an entire room to dedicate to the kids, you’re not out of luck. You can carve out a nook of your home to become a play area.
If you have a breakfast nook that doesn’t see much use, it’s a good spot to centralize your play area as it tends to be centralized between the kitchen and living area which both have high traffic.
This way, no matter which room you’re using, you’re not far from the kids. Hopefully the space will already have some kind of divider to partition it off, but you can create your own with small shelving units that can double as storage for toys and books.
Even pulling your sofa away from a wall can create an extra “room” that the kids can congregate in.
But let’s not kid ourselves here — you can plan a nice centralized area for all your kid’s toys, but you’ll still be stepping on toy bricks on your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. It’s a fact of life.
What’s under the stairs?
One of the biggest space sucks in a multi-level home is that area underneath the stairs. Instead of letting that space lie bare, you could build and install shelving units underneath to increase your storage space. This is a great opportunity to build a mini-library, a custom wine rack, or a place to store your shoe collection.
If you’re handy, this is even a project you could tackle on your own. You’ll have to account for the amount of space underneath the staircase as well as the pitch of the stair themselves for any upper shelves. This is a pretty inexpensive weekend DIY project if you’ve got the know-how — and you don’t need an expensive, high quality material. You can usually get away with using a plywood product.
If the basement has a moisture problem, avoid using particleboard as it will really absorb that water, potentially ruining your shelves. Remember, for a job like this, where you want it to fit snugly in the frame of the stair, the phrase measure twice, cut once has never been more appropriate.
The bathroom expansion
Finding storage in a small bathroom is no easy feat. You have your area under the sink, maybe a medicine cabinet, hopefully a niche in the shower, but in some cases, that’s it. What are a few ways you can make some extra storage space?
Floating shelves are a great way to store soaps and towels while remaining easily accessible. As long as you have some empty wall space, you’ll have some room for floating shelves. If you’ve got a floating sink, without vanity storage, you can still add a floating shelf underneath the sink. This gives you the same open look you were going for with the sink, but still gives you room to store some extra supplies.
In the shower, corner shelf units can offer enough shelving to hold your cleaning products, without encroaching on the space you need to shower comfortably. What I like about shower shelves is that they can be added during a bathroom renovation, or after the tiling process giving you an easy storage solution.