Sooo it’s my first time to post on my blog with my very own domain name and I’m pretty excited about it. 🙂 🙂 I made the switch from texmexmom.wordpress.com to thetexmexmom.com two days ago and am still figuring things out. I am not a techy person by any means so setting up my blog has been a lot of trial and error and googling, but it’s fun and I’m excited to be where I’m at!
But anyway, today I want to share a post that I started writing forever ago but never got around to posting. Although we now have a bit more space, Pablo and I started out in a one bedroom, 550 square foot apartment. When we found out that we were expecting the first time, we made the decision not to move because the price that we paid for rent was an amazing deal. In fact, rent for the two bedroom home we currently live in is about three times more (which is so much sadder looking on the budget ha, ha…)
So, we stayed put and that apartment continued to work perfectly for us. There were just a few changes that we had to make when Caleb was born in order to make room for all the baby stuff. I thought I’d share a few pictures and tips of how we made the apartment work well for our family.
Baby’s sleeping arrangements
One of our first decisions to make was whether to keep the baby in our bedroom or to make a spot for a crib in the living room. Our neighbors did the latter when they had a baby. They came up with a creative way to divide their living room with bookshelves to turn half the room into a nook for the baby.
We decided pretty quickly though that for us it would work best for the baby to share our bedroom. We really enjoy having people over and knew that having a baby in the living room would complicate that a lot. As it turned out, Caleb took quite awhile to sleep through the night (like, a year) so it was convenient for me to have him close at hand in the bedroom. Also, Pablo can sleep through anything so his sleep was rarely disturbed (lucky man!) 😉
{grainy picture of the “baby corner”}
As you can see, we chose to use a pack n play instead of a regular crib. This is the one we got; it’s actually smaller than a regular pack n play which made it even better for us. My only worry about buying a smaller pack n play was that Caleb would outgrow it super fast, but he was able to use it for a little over a year.
Storing baby’s clothes
There was no way I could make room in our dressers for baby clothes so we bought a hanging closet organizer. I kept all of Caleb’s current clothes or ones he was about to grow into in there, as well as a few baby linens. It worked great!
{hanging organizer}
I also kept two long plastic containers under our bed. One was for clothes that Caleb had just out-grown and the other was for clothes he would fit into soon. We also had several shorter versions of those containers under our couch in the living room for extra storage for random things like our external hard drives and random cords.
Other helpful hints
When living in a small apartment, furniture with built-in storage is amazing. These are some of the items we have:
- Cube storage: I love cube storage for containing toys (and trust me, no matter how minimalistic you are, toys have a way of multiplying!) This is a poor picture but at least you can get the idea. I love that the bench has cubes underneath!
- Storage ottoman: we love our ottoman because it looks pretty, makes a great seat and houses some of our extra linens. This is similar to the one we have. We used to keep it at the foot of our bed but now at our new home it takes the place of a bench on one side of our kitchen table.
- Large baskets (with covers/lids): ok, so not technically furniture, but a basket with a lid can save the day when your house is messy and you find out that guests are coming unexpectedly! They are also great for storing toys while still looking nice sitting in your living room. (And as you can see in the picture, they’re great for baby to play in as well haha!)
As far as baby equipment goes, don’t freak out about not having room for it all. We’ve found that you don’t really need everything they say you need. For example, there was no room in our apartment for a changing table but we got along just great with a changing pad on the bed!
There are some great space-saving options for those things that you do need though. In case you missed it, I shared some of my favorite baby items here.
Also, if you have the opportunity it also works well to borrow larger items (like a swing or an exersaucer) from a friend; it’s really nice to be able to return the items once baby has outgrown them and not have to worry about storing them.
None of these tips are rocket science but I hope they are helpful just the same. I’m convinced that most of us do not need as much space as we think we do. With a little organization and some thoughtful decisions you can make a small apartment or home work perfectly. 🙂 Let me know what you think in the comments below!
