What 900 Square Feet Taught Me About Small Space Living
Updated: Aug 22
I grew up in a large historic house built in the 1920s, the kind of house that plenty of people would probably consider a dream home. It had beautiful old details, lots of rooms, and plenty of space for our family of seven. My mom loved Early American antiques, history and preservation, and she created a home around the things that she valued. The funny thing is, I never felt particularly at home there.
That isn’t a criticism of my mom or the home she created. I think it took me years to understand something that seems incredibly obvious to me now: home is relative. What makes one person feel comfortable and grounded might make someone else feel differently, and neither person has to be wrong.
Today, Kevin and I live with our dog Mars in a roughly 900-square-foot apartment built in the early 1980s. There is nothing architecturally remarkable about it. We have popcorn ceilings, beige walls, a dated scalloped bathroom sink, one bathroom, very little kitchen storage and a deck I would happily make three times its current size.
And I have never felt better in a home.
I think part of that is simply that I have learned what feels good to me. I like smaller, contained spaces. I like being able to move easily from one part of our home to another, to hear when the washing machine has finished, and to know that every room is part of our everyday life. I don’t particularly enjoy homes with rooms that rarely get used. There is something about all that empty space that has never felt comfortable to me.
A smaller home feels insulated to me, almost like the quiet that happens after a fresh snow, when the world suddenly feels softer and sound doesn’t seem to travel quite as far. Our apartment holds us in a way that makes me feel grounded, cozy and connected.
And I’ve learned that feeling matters to me far more than square footage.
Admiration Doesn’t Have to Become Aspiration
I have an unusual perspective on homes because I spend my working life inside them. As a professional home organizer, I have worked in everything from small apartments to large, beautiful, multimillion-dollar houses, so I have had the opportunity to experience a pretty wide spectrum of how people live.
There are homes I walk into and immediately think, This is beautiful. I can appreciate the architecture, the enormous kitchen, the beautiful finishes or the incredible view, and I can completely understand why the people who live there fell in love with it. But I can also know that I wouldn’t want to live there.
That distinction has become increasingly important to me, especially in a world where we are exposed to other people’s homes constantly. Keeping up with the Joneses has become, in many ways, keeping up with the influencers. We can scroll through beautiful kitchens, enormous walk-in pantries, perfectly organized mudrooms and acres of landscaped outdoor space until someone else’s version of home quietly starts becoming the standard by which we judge our own.
I don’t think there is anything wrong with wanting those things if they genuinely suit the way you want to live. What I have learned, though, is that admiration doesn’t have to become aspiration. I can think your house is beautiful without wanting to live in it.
For most of our lives, bigger is presented as the natural progression. More square footage, more bedrooms, more storage, more yard. But all of that “more” usually asks something from us in return: more money, more maintenance, more time, more energy, more things and more responsibility.
Sometimes more is absolutely worth the trade. And sometimes less gives you more of the life you actually want.
What Small Space Living Gives Back to Us
One of my favorite things about our apartment is how easy it is to take care of. I can clean the entire thing relatively quickly, we have one bathroom to maintain, we don’t have a yard that needs our attention, and because we rent, there isn’t a running list of home maintenance projects waiting for our time and money.
That matters to me because Kevin works long hours, I work outside our home several days a week, and we are building Kevin & Kate together in the time around all of that. I don’t want an enormous portion of our available time going toward maintaining the place where we live. I want our home to support our life. I don’t want our life to revolve around supporting our home.
Living small also keeps us physically close, which happens to suit us. We tend to be in the same rooms, we know what the other person is doing, and our lives naturally overlap throughout the day. For two people who genuinely like spending time together, that proximity feels good.
There are plenty of couples who would probably feel completely claustrophobic living the way we do, and that’s exactly the point. The goal isn’t to decide that small is better. It is to pay enough attention to yourself to know what your better actually is.
Everything Needs a Home
This is where the professional organizer in me has to enter the conversation, because there is one reality of small-space living that no amount of clever organizing can change: you cannot manufacture square footage.
People sometimes assume that if they can just find the right organizing system, everything they own will somehow fit. Sometimes a better system really is the answer, but sometimes there is simply more stuff than there is available space.
When that happens, you have two basic options. You can create more storage, or you can create more space.
Creating storage might mean adding shelves, choosing better furniture, using the backs of doors or taking advantage of vertical space that has been overlooked. Creating space means letting something go.
That reality has made Kevin and me much more intentional about what comes into our home. When we’re considering something new, the questions become:
Do we need it?
Will we use it?
Do we love or value it?
And, importantly, where is it going to live?
If there isn’t a good answer to that last question, we either don’t bring it home or decide whether we value it enough to let something else go.
Make Your Space Work Harder
When square footage is limited, I think furniture should work harder.
For years I had coffee tables that were simply beautiful coffee tables. Ours now has a drawer where we keep batteries, chargers and other little things we regularly need, along with a lower shelf for books and coasters. It still looks good, but it also gives us storage that would otherwise have to come from somewhere else.
I give clients this advice all the time. If you need storage, choose furniture that provides it. Look for nightstands with drawers instead of tiny pedestal tables, consoles with cabinets instead of open legs, beds that allow for storage underneath and pieces that can serve more than one purpose.
I also talk to my organizing clients about high-value real estate, the areas of your home that are easiest to access and therefore need to work especially hard for you. In a small kitchen, for example, I don’t want something we use twice a year taking up a prime cabinet while something we reach for every week is buried somewhere inconvenient. Sometimes that means being unconventional about where things live. We’ve turned part of our guest-room closet into overflow storage for kitchen and cocktail supplies because those are things we want to keep, but they don’t all need to occupy the most valuable space in our kitchen.
The same principle applies vertically. When you don’t have much horizontal square footage, walls become valuable real estate. Shelves, hooks, over-the-door storage and tall furniture can give you an enormous amount of functionality without requiring a larger footprint.
Our guest room is also my office, and for a long time I assumed I simply couldn’t have both. Having a comfortable place for people to stay mattered more to me than having a dedicated office, so I went without one until I eventually designed a waterfall-style desk that fits at the foot of the bed. Now the room serves both purposes without sacrificing either one.
Living small has forced me to become more creative, and I actually think our home is better because of it.
Function Matters More Than Visual Perfection
This one has probably required more growth from me than any of the others.
I like things to look good. I like clean visual lines, intentional styling and spaces that feel edited. Before living with Kevin, I probably would have described myself as fairly minimalist.
Then I married a man who loves gadgets.
We cook constantly, we make cocktails, we have multiple coffee-making methods, we brought home Kevin’s mom’s record collection, and somewhere along the way our small apartment had to accommodate not only my belongings and preferences, but his too.
There are pots and pans stored above our kitchen cabinets because there is nowhere else for them to go. We have both a coffee maker and an espresso machine on our the counter because we actually use both. Kevin’s mom’s records are visible in our television console, and while I could probably dream up a prettier solution in a different home, this is the solution that works in this one.
I’ve had to relax my definition of visual perfection and remember that a home is supposed to function for the people who live there.
Everything still has a place, and our home is still intentional and beautiful to us, but it also looks like two people with full lives actually live here. I think that’s healthier than perfection anyway.
I’ve Learned to Calculate Cost in More Than Dollars
One of the most interesting things about having limited storage is that it changes the way you think about value.
Buying in bulk is an easy example. A giant package of paper towels might technically cost less per roll, but if I don’t have anywhere to store the remaining rolls, the calculation changes. If they have to sit on top of the refrigerator or take over the only shelf available for something else, that purchase has created another kind of cost.
Visual clutter has a cost. Mental overload has a cost. Having to move four things every time you need the fifth thing has a cost. Losing the ease and functionality of your home has a cost. Those costs may not appear on a receipt, but they still affect the way you live.
Someone with a large basement storage room might buy the exact same bulk package and experience none of those downsides, which makes it a perfectly good decision for them. For us, saving a few dollars isn’t necessarily valuable if the tradeoff is living with something that makes our home less functional for the next six months.
I’ve learned that the cheapest option isn’t always the one that costs me the least.
Let the Space Tell You When You Have Enough
Living in a small home creates boundaries, and I’ve come to appreciate them. In fact, one of the simplest organizing strategies I use, both at home and professionally, is to create boundaries within those boundaries by deciding how much space I’m willing to give a particular category.
T-shirts live in this drawer. Water bottles live on this shelf. Clothes live on the hangers we already have. Towels have this much room in the linen closet. The container itself helps determine how much is enough.
That doesn’t mean I can never buy another T-shirt or bring home a new water bottle. It simply means that when the designated space is full, I have a decision to make. If I love the new thing enough to bring it in, something else may need to leave. I don’t automatically solve the problem by buying another storage bin or finding another corner where I can squeeze more in.
I think this is one of the most useful lessons a small home can teach you, because without some kind of boundary, almost any category can continue expanding indefinitely. You can own 30 water bottles if you want to, but eventually you have to ask where those 30 water bottles are going to live and whether giving them that much space is actually how you want to use your home.
We don’t need ten sets of towels because there are only two of us, we do laundry regularly, and there is no reason to dedicate precious storage space to things we rarely use. The same goes for extra bedding, clothes, kitchen gadgets, books and all the other things that can accumulate almost invisibly when there is enough space to keep putting them somewhere.
This doesn’t mean we don’t own things. We do, and many of them are things we genuinely love. I have probably become less minimalist since Kevin and I combined our lives, but I think I’ve become more intentional.
The question isn’t whether we own a lot or a little. The question is whether the things we own are worth the space they occupy in our life.
That boundary can actually feel protective. Our apartment protects us from accumulating endlessly because eventually the answer is simply, There isn’t anywhere for that to go. It makes us pause before purchasing something and decide whether it is useful, meaningful or valuable enough to make room for.
And for us, this is freedom
I Would Still Happily Take a Pantry
None of this means 900 square feet fulfills every dream I have for a home.
I would love a pantry. Desperately.
Our food storage is probably the biggest pain point in our apartment, and because we cook as much as we do, I would happily take more room for ingredients, appliances and kitchen equipment. I would also love a larger outdoor space where we could lounge and have friends over, and I certainly wouldn’t turn down a beautiful bathtub.
Kevin and I have talked about houses we might own or build someday, and if we ever move, I imagine we will have more space than we have now. But I don’t think we would suddenly want a huge house. We talk much more about what we would want the additional space to do.
A pantry would make cooking easier. A larger outdoor area would allow us to entertain. A dedicated office would give me a place to work without asking the guest room to do double duty.
I’ve learned to be specific about what I want more for.
That feels very different from wanting more simply because more is supposed to mean that you’ve arrived.
Maybe Home Is Whatever Feels Like Home to You
I sometimes think about how unremarkable our apartment looks from the outside. Years ago, before my boss had ever been inside, I remember wondering what she must think when she dropped something at our door. Then one day she came over, walked inside and immediately told me how adorable it was.
It still makes me smile because that is our apartment in a nutshell.
There is nothing particularly impressive about the shell itself. We have simply filled it with our lives until it developed a heartbeat.
It is warm and comfortable, it holds the furniture and art I’ve collected over the years, Kevin’s things and mine have become ours, and nearly every corner is used. We cook here, work here, make cocktails here, listen to records here, welcome people here, spend our Wednesday nights at the table here and curl up on the sofa with Mars here.
It feels alive because we live in it.
Maybe someday we will have the pantry, the bathtub and the larger outdoor space. Maybe our next home will be 1,200 square feet or 1,500 or something entirely different. I don’t really know, and I’ve stopped needing to know.
What I do know is that I no longer assume bigger means better.
I have been inside enough homes to know that there are countless beautiful ways to live, and I’ve lived enough life to understand that someone else’s version of home doesn’t have to become mine.
If you love the sprawling house, love it. If you dream about acreage, go find it. If your little apartment makes you feel safe and grounded and gives you enough financial freedom to travel, stay there as long as it serves you. And if you’re currently living somewhere you once thought was temporary, maybe it is worth asking whether you’re actually unhappy there or whether you’ve simply been taught that you should want something more.
There is no square footage at which a home officially becomes enough.
I think we get to decide that for ourselves.
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A little more about us
We’re Kevin and Kate, and this little apartment is where so much of Kevin & Kate began. It’s where we cook, create, make cocktails, gather around the table, and come back to each other at the end of ordinary days. It’s also home to Date Nite, our weekly ritual of making something delicious, pouring a drink, turning on some music, and setting aside a little intentional time for us. If that sounds like your kind of evening, we’d love to have you join us.
Great tips on organizing and building room in a small space while making it all look beautiful!