So we are about to move into our new space. It’s taken me a bit to write this post. It’s as if I’ve suddenly realized I’ve made a lot of our life and family choices public and I feel exposed, haha. I’ve always been comfortable with what I shared publicly because I always did it with the intention of helping others to feel safe and proud of living small with their families. Now 7.5 years later I feel that our small space journey is continuing in a new way and I’m nervous. We made a choice to move for our family and I hope it is the right decision for us. It may not be! We are human and we make the best decisions we can with the information we have at the time. All we can do is make the leap and make the best of it. We are moving with the best of intentions, to take all of the lessons learned in our 600 square foot one bedroom home and carry them over to a bit more square footage. The lessons I carry with me are:

Less is more

One in One Out

Multi-functional spaces

Multi-functional furniture

Fewer Better Things = More Time

The New Apartment

Our new home is a One Bedroom and Den Apartment that is 900-ish square feet (after measuring some of the space the floorplan doesn’t add up, will be able to confirm the square footage at some point). It is two floors. The living space is upstairs…. living room, dining room and galley kitchen. Downstairs is a bathroom and two rooms. You have to walk through the “den” to get to the bedroom so it is not technically a two bedroom. I mention this weird layout because I think it is how it got missed by the super competitive Vancouver market.

I do believe real estate involves trade offs (especially in Vancouver). I did not find a place the checked all of the boxes within our budget. I included our list of Needs vs Wants from a few months ago (Previous Post HERE) below to see where we landed. Oh and we are moving neighborhoods. I felt we couldn’t be picky about neighborhood when we had so many specific needs from our future home. Being on a quiet street, yet still being walkable to everything meant the most and we felt we couldn’t exclude any neighborhood within the city. All in all, the biggest compromise we made was letting go of high ceilings. There are only high ceilings in the “Den” which will be our bedroom. But it is a corner unit so there are windows in almost every room. So while we compromised on ceiling height, we didn’t compromise on light.

Needs:

2nd bedroom - YES
Lots of Natural Light - YES
Wall space for wall bed in main living area (hard to find!) - NO (bedroom can be split in two so not needed)
Quiet Street - YES
High Ceilings at least in part of unit - KINDA (high ceilings in one room)
Walkable City Neighbourhood - YES

Wants:

A Galley Kitchen or somewhat concealed Kitchen (that needs me to reno it!) - YES!!
Functional Entryway (or potential for a functional entryway) - NO (it’s ok, i love a challenge)
Outdoor Green Space/Patio - YES (2 patios!)
2nd bathroom/powder room - NO
Close to parks - YES

It’s funny because the most asked question so far has been how many square feet is the place?!! And I know I brought that on myself by naming my blog 600sqftandababy. Even though we are moving into a larger apartment (with two floors!) There are still a number of things in the space that are real small space challenges that we don’t have in our current smaller space. There is only a 12” wide entry closet for 4 people. The kitchen is smaller than our current kitchen and there is one closet for the whole apartment. The living room is so small I’m not sure it can fit anything beyond a loveseat (after all my talk about big couches in small spaces!!). I am sooo excited to tackle these challenges.

Also, if you are still living in a very small space and loving it, good for you! If you are living in a larger space but intentionally with fewer things, good for you! I will always be cheering and advocating for small space living and will always be available to share everything we learned and will continue to learn about small space living as a family. I hope everyone still finds a place here for encouragement in small living well with fewer better things.

I promise to share more soon but this is enough for me for now. First up some fresh paint and lighter floors!

We're Moving