• Home
• About
• Contact
• Giveaway MckLinky
• Holiday Gift Guide
• PR Submissions
• Review Archive
• Webisodes

Making Our Small House Livable

We are a few weeks into the move and the house is starting to take  some shape now. An air conditioner was iinstalled in our living room making it the first completed room in the house. Let’s see, that only leaves me with 7 more rooms!

I have been spending quite a bit of time at the new house during this process and one thing that continues to come into my mind is how much more family interaction will occur in the house. There are a couple of reasons for this.

The biggest change deals with house is setup in such a way that the space can be organized and managed better than our old house. You may remember from my last post that our old house had a large 26 x 26 foot living room area. The ceilings in that room were at least 10 feet tall as well (and that’s a conservative estimate). We never turned on the air conditioner in that room. The amount of energy it would take to cool it down would be enormous and so though it was a great space for playing, we didn’t use it as much as we could have due to the heat. (This never really affected Jojo since the first thing he did every day was strip down to his undies).

Since our main room was usually hot, Candice and I spent most of our time in the office (a smaller room that was easier to keep cool). Jojo and Deeds would come in sometimes but since there wasn’t much to do in the office, they usually weren’t there for long.

Our office area in the new house will be in the kitchen/dining room. I have put up a desk and shelves under the stair case to hold our computer and other office stuff. Since our living room is really small, the cool air will easily spill into the office area and keep it cool as well. With the two rooms being close together, we’ll all be able to do whatever it is we do – together.

I mentioned last time that the smaller area is going to force us to spend more time outdoors. Jojo and Deeds both love to run around and there won’t be much of that inside the house since there’s no room. This week I’ve seen that we’re going to have plenty of options for outdoor time. Here’s a quick list of what we could do:

1. Tend to the garden
2. Walk down to the corner store (about 50 yards away) for a treat
3. Walk down to the school (VIS is about 75 yards away) to play on the playground
4. Take an outdoor bath/ have swim time in the big plastic tub
5. Go down to VIS to ride bikes together

So, it’s not a huge list, but I’m just excited about being in a neighborhood that will allow us to walk around to different places. At the old house, if we wanted to go on an excursion, we usually would take the motorbike. Deeds would sit between my legs in front of me holding on the speedometer and Jojo would sit behind me hugging me around my belly. While we had fun and they both loved riding on the motorbike, there are just too many dangers involved to be doing it on a regular basis.

For example, we got our ‘67 Vespa up and running about two months ago after a couple of years of sitting in the driveway not functioning.

It still has a brand new rebuilt engine, so it only took blowing out the fuel line to get it to start up. However, it had two flat (and dry rotted) tires from sitting so long. We took it to our Vespa guy who changed one of the tires and put new tubes in both of them. However, he forgot to put in a little safety clasp that keeps the wheel nut from turning. A couple of days later as the boys and I were cruising down the road, the back tire fell off. Fortunately, we were only going about 20 miles an hour and the back casing kept the tire from completely falling off, but it made for a harrowing few seconds as the wheel jammed up into the wheel casing and sent us skidding for about 30 feet.We kept our balance and didn’t fall off, but there were also no cars around us at the time.

So, I’ll be thankful to walk back and forth from school starting in August

- Guest post by Nick, aka Dad Most Traveled!

(Read earlier installments about our journey towards the simple life in The Downsizing Journey Begins and The Great Purge, 2009)

Submit Article: Digg | Google Bookmarks | Add to Technorati Favorites | kirtsy | Stumble It! | Del.icio.us

Comments