Our Minimalist Bedroom that fits a king size bed.
Our minimalist bedroom is the most wasteful room in our home. But I love it. Our king sized bed is a space hog and a real luxury for an apartment dwelling family. We still have the occasional night where a kid or baby is sleeping between us and weekend mornings where all five of us are piled into bed together. Plus my husband is 6’5″ and I’m 6 feet tall. Big people love big beds.
Wasted and inefficient space usage gives us a lot of hope for the future. It means we can create more space without moving. Rooms can become multi-purpose. We can invest in some stowaway furniture and mix up who sleeps where or works where. This will create more kid friendly play space and, later, more teen friendly spots for privacy.
A king size bed, one nightstand and a dresser are all that we have in this room.
This is truly a minimalist bedroom if you’re just counting the pieces of furniture. While it is a big room there aren’t a lot of options for placing furniture. The closet, two doors (one to the ensuite) and the floor to ceiling windows limit where a bed or dresser can go. There is a nook in one corner that could be useful for a desk someday for older kids. We will have to get creative with space in the future because we intend to have three kids in this room at some point.
The laundry bag on a hook over the door was a gift for my husband last Christmas. Sometimes the kids table and chairs live in the corner nook. If one of our kids wants to draw/build/do in peace it’s nice to create a separate space for them.
Open floor space makes for an easy minimalist bedroom.
Having free floor space comes in handy for creating impromptu work areas and solutions for infrequent or temporary needs. I’ll share our future planning in another post. For now, I think with a light renovation on the closet we could do away with the dresser. We’d be able to store all of our clothing and household linens in the closet opening the room up further. I sometimes think about a murphy bed for even more floor space and using this space as my office during the day.
Our minimalist bedroom is very simple and I haven’t put much on the walls. I think our three kids could be in here sooner than I have planned. Plus, when I am in here and not sleeping I am reading. A book and this evening view is really all I need to enjoy this space.
The second most wasteful room in our home is the office.
Another good sign for making this home work for us in the years to come. We’ve been living here for almost a year and I still haven’t decided on what or if we should put a book shelf or storage unit in the office.
This room is south facing and it’s a challenging space to use. It’s very hot in the summer and the light in the afternoon makes it very hard to work on a computer. I’ve turned the desk around a full 360 degrees to find the right spot and nothing works for the full day.I haven’t felt compelled to figure out a better solution or invest in furniture or black out shades or screens. If I’m working in the afternoon I just move to my minimalist bedroom and use my dresser as a standing desk.
In the evening our youngest sleeps in the office in a portable crib. If I face the desk to the large window it makes it very awkward to bring the crib. Eventually this will be our oldest’s bedroom. At that time my work space will be in my minimalist bedroom.
Everyone has a place or room they throw stuff to deal with later – even me the minimalist-ish mom – and for my family this is the office. I have a box with a kite to be repaired and small electronics to sell or recycle. There is that Hungry Hippo game that we’re trying to keep out of our baby’s sight line because he loves the small red plastic balls for the game. There are three picture frames I haven’t put up since we moved and this foam dinosaur construction kit thing that the oldest got as a gift. We started the kit but haven’t finished it.
The desk drawers quickly accumulate things. I find myself sorting through them every other month to return Lego bits to their proper home and recycle old school notices and receipts. Our office is definitely the family clutter hot spot. I’ve spared you the photos but know that it is there!
The office also doubles as the baby’s room at night right now. It works quite well as the older two are staying up a bit later now that it’s so light out. Does he look like he minds sleeping in an office in a portable crib with no nursery to call his own?
It’s a positive that we are using two rooms inefficiently.
It means we have room to grow in this space. Right now I really enjoy our minimalist bedroom and how simple and uncluttered the space is. I also really enjoy that it could work as a bedroom for all three boys and give us options in the future.
More in the Home Tour series:
- One bedroom for three kids
- The couch that fits a family of five
- The IKEA hacked bunk beds that saved us.
Are you using any rooms in your home inefficiently? Do you have single purpose rooms that only get occasional use like a home office or guest bedroom?
I would love a small apartment but I have three adult children still living at home so that dream is put on hold until they fly the nest, whenever that is!…lol However I still like living a minimalist life, it’s a journey.
Love the photo of the view from your bedroom of a night.
I can’t think about adult children needing to live at home… it is not in my plan!! 🙂
lol…it wasn’t in mine either but these things happen 🙂
We’re living in a two bedroom apartment and it’s just myself and Mr. Picky Pincher. It’s quite small, even as we try to parse down a lot of our possessions for minimalistic living. Our guest bedroom does also function as my “craft room.” We also have a desk in our bedroom that functions as our office as well as sewing desk. It could always be better, but we’re slowly but surely getting there!
We have one laundry basket for our family of 4 (1200 square feet). It lives in the bottom of my husbands closet and when it’s full we do a load (usually every day). If something needs separating we sort as we load the washing machine. Sheets get carried there and back and we put them right back on the bed. Two buckets in laundry area for soaking. I wasn’t intentionally being minimalist but it does free up floor space and doing laundry more frequently allows us to have fewer clothes.
i’ve been a reader for quite awhile now, and this might be my favorite series you’ve done! I love seeing how you’re using the space and hearing how you think through everything. So helpful and I love getting peaks into how others live in their spaces. Now that my 3 boys are in the same room, I have a guest room and a spare room upstairs that I am using inefficiently but it will take some time and brainstorming to figure out what to use them for! And the floor to ceilings with your city view – my goodness i’m so jealous!
This has been really enjoyable for me to write and take photos for 🙂 And I’ve got some great ideas from the comments. Now I’m thinking about turning the office into a playroom and having just beds and clothing in the boy’s room.
There is a You Tube series about a little girl living in Japan and she shows different aspects of their Japanese life. (I think the father is Canadian actually.) When they did the apartment tour I was intrigued that one whole room was the storage room. This had all their books, school stuff, coats and boots, office supplies, linens, and any other things that needed a place. The other rooms were completely clutter free except for the furniture relevant to that room. So the living room had the dining table and chairs and the sofa and tv. The bedrooms had rolled up futons for beds and a closet for clothes. It meant that the rooms could be smaller. I keep thinking about this as an idea and it’s sort of logical.
With the benefit of hindsight (grownup kids/grandkids), this is what I would now if I had young kids – night nursery/day nursery (i.e. bedroom and playroom and all kids together in bunks.
Also, have you ever thought about making the smallest room (office?) into your bed-room (least daytime use…), as in, literally, nothing but the bed? It would solve your sun problem, too. Then you’d have space for the above…
From all these comments I had been thinking about turning the office into a playroom. It seems like a very smart idea for so many reasons. But now you have me thinking about the bedroom option… It is the loudest room – gets a lot of traffic noise on that side of the street. Lots to think about for the future. Appreciate you weighing in on this Mel. 🙂
Wait, I’m super confused about the laundry basket thing. What do you use? We have laundry baskets primarily for collecting dirty clothes and (secondarily) carrying them to the washing machine. I can carry them without the basket, but it certainly saves some trips. The dryer is close enough to the couch that I take them out of the dryer, put them on the couch, then put them away from there. (Well, lately the kids have been “delivering” them to the right place with a toddler pushcart thing.) Do all of your dirty clothes go in the laundry bag? What about the kids’ clothes? Thanks for any insights!
Love the view and your beautiful home!
We used to not have laundry baskets in our rooms. We just had one hamper that everyone’s clothing went into that was kept near the washer. My husband put his foot down on this when we moved back to Vancouver and said he wanted a laundry basket or hamper in our bedroom. There is a bigger basket near our washing machine that I take my clothes to and cajole the kids to take their clothes too as well.
We have a full, unfinished basement, and I wish I could make it disappear (except for maybe a space for the utilities)! We have plenty of storage space throughout the rest of the house, and two other living spaces, so we don’t really need to finish it down the road for more space and I worry that it is just going to slowly fill up with stuff that we don’t actually need!
Turn it into a basement suite and start renting it out? I heard a brilliant idea from someone that had a lot of kids and turned their basement into a daycare. They hired people to run the daycare and their kids basically went to it for free.
Brillint idea about the daycare. Other ideas could be to finish it and rent it out as office space or for people to give group classes. Or just rent out sections of it as storage space for the unenlightened.
Where to put the home office is my biggest bug-bear in this apartment. My bedroom has room for either an office or a dressing table but not both and there is no view from the window (a brick wall) so it’s not pleasant to work there. And I like to have a dressing table.
I have been renting out the spare room for extra income though this is the ideal space for the desk and computer.
So I end up with everything overflowing all over the living room as there is nowhere to put a desk in this narrow room which is also our dining room.
I finally decided that the extra income is not worth it – we need our privacy and our living room back. This week I swapped the beds around, got rid of an unused trundle bed, and will be buying an IKEA desk for the new spudy asap.
Now I need to revisit the budget and see where we can tighten our belts.
I forgot to say that no art on the wall is necessary with the amazing view from that enormous window.
Enjoyed reading your process for deciding what gets space where and what is the priority. I have to be so intentional with our home and I like that.
Very curious about renting your second room out as a family. Was it long term renters or more short term/ Air B’n’B type rentals?
It’s a very specific market. I am a single mother with one daughter so we only take one female guest at a time for short term. As we live in an area of Jerusalem with many Anglo expats and we all have small apartments, it is often someone’s mother or friend visiting them but they have nowhere to put them up comfortably. I also take a student when the local colleges have short courses (10 days – 6 weeks, usually over the summer). These are all people with things to do during the day and people to socialize with in the evenings and weekends. And they are all friends of friends or recommended by people I know. Having decided not to do it this summer a friend asked me if I could take a woman from Britain for 3 weeks in July while she is on a course. I found myself saying yes.
Ha! You made my day. I read King Bed, one night stand over and over. Was trying to figure out how we had gone from Minimalist living with kids to Netflix and Chill. Made so much more sense when I scrolled down and saw a picture of your bed side table. Still laughing at myself and my inability to realize you were talking about furniture.
Hahaha! I laughed out loud at this comment. I will have to go back and fix the typo – but what a wonderful typo. 🙂
Our house is too big (2000 sq ft) with inefficient usage, but I don’t plan to move for 20 years. Today a big chunk of my living room is being taken up by a cardboard fort that gets taken down and rebuilt every couple of weeks; someday there will be a piano and reading area there. The big exercise/sewing/guest room with an en suite will become a shared room for two big girls that presently are little girls sharing a small room with toddler beds (because they’re too young to have an en suite, but their current room is too small for two twin beds), while the exercise/sewing areas are downsized and guest space eliminated. The reading nook in the playroom will have to move to the living room when (hopefully) baby three comes along.
I love your statement of “it’s a positive that we are using two of our rooms inefficiently. It means we have room to grow in this space.”
Also, your view is gorgeous. I’ve been to Vancouver twice and loved it.
You are just like me with the planning. “When they get to ___ we will move to ____ and then ____.” Writing these posts and reading all the great comments has given me even more ideas. Now I’m thinking about moving my desk into the master bedroom and turning the office into a play room. It would give us lots of room for a full size bunkbed in the small bedroom. It’s great to have options. 🙂