We didn’t really need a three bedroom apartment.
I knew we could get by with two bedrooms but when this apartment became available we jumped at it. We liked the layout and location and the open kitchen. The third bedroom was a perk. At the time we were hoping to have another baby so I felt like the third bedroom would make it a reality.
It’s been useful to have an extra bedroom. My sister has stayed it in a few times already and will visit us three more times by the end of the year.
What hasn’t been useful about this extra bedroom has been the way I’ve used it to store things I don’t want to deal with.
The picture above is it at its worst just yesterday. We had friends over for dinner on Saturday and we cut things a little close with our afternoon activities to do a proper clean up. So, of course, we just threw the remnants of our outing into the spare room.
As I mentioned the other week, I’ve let things slide with my pregnancy fatigue. The spare bedroom has been a great place to hide things I didn’t have the energy for.
I should know better because this is what our spare bedroom looked liked for months after we moved into a new home in the summer of 2009.
Think long and hard about having a guest room or spare bedroom. I know we’ll end up using this room quite a bit and could see Henry or his sibling moving into it in a few years. We’ll use it but it certainly wasn’t a necessity. And when I look at this photo and the really disastrous one from three years ago, I’m reminded again that for me, extra space means more work and more clutter.
The good news is that unlike our old guest bedroom, this one only took thirty minutes to straighten up.
Not perfect but making progress.
I have a few other areas of our home to work on so I’ve signed myself up for Mandi at Life Your Ways Simplify for Fall Challenge. It runs next week and I’ll have my own posts going up each day on how I’ve simplified our home and made some order for fall. Need a kick in the pants to get your house in order for September? This is it.
Anyone else have a spare room? Is it a clutter attractor or do you use it wisely? I’d always hoped that if we had a spare bedroom I would turn it into an office. Unfortunately this room is a touch too small for that.
Ill never have a ‘spare’ room again. In had a realisation – its cheaper to pay for my familys motel room a few times a year and not pay the rent for the extra square metres.
In my case, it was like was hoarding square metres. It will be studio or one bedroom from now on and we will only upscale if we make babies!
When we were looking for a house, people assumed we were looking for a 5 bedroom. First off, that many bedrooms would’ve cost a fortune in our area. But more importantly, I already knew about the issue of extra space. We bought a 3 bedroom instead, the girls share, and we plan on getting our 20 month old son a double bed when he upgrades out of the crib. That way, we can have a bed for guests, and he can sleep with his sisters or in our room when necessary.
Isn’t it funny how we plan for the possible future? You weren’t too far off though in needing the 3rd bedroom. Glad it was a quick pick up too.
For the longest time my hubby kept saying that our house was so messy because we needed a bigger house, more space for our ‘stuff.’ I finally convinced him (with the help of your blog, so thank you!) that it wasn’t the size of the house it was the ‘stuff.’ We downsized 150 sq feet and increased by one person, and we’re much better off now. I’m still not the world’s best housekeeper, LOL, but I’m working on that part.
Well, I have to say, I’ve been there – only much, MUCH worse. Our spare room is in the basement, which makes it double trouble in the “out of sight out of mind” department. But it didn’t get really bad until a couple of kittens adopted us a few years back and everything that was deemed unsafe for kittens got tossed in there and the door shut. Once it was a “shut door space” it became all too easy to just open the door and toss in anything that I didn’t want to deal with. OY!
I finally made myself go through it a while back, and it was bad. How bad? Well… a mouse had taken up residence down there bad. So I salvaged what I could, tossed what I couldn’t, and took a whole car load of junk to the thrift store. NEVER AGAIN! From now on that door stays open, and NO MORE avoiding things I don’t want to deal with. Trust me, avoiding it makes it so much worse!
We don’t have a spare room as such, but we do have an office space attached to our garage. When we moved into our house this was our teaching room, as we both teach music, but seeing as how both of us have done most of our teaching away from home for the last 3 years we’ve lived here, it’s been a great junk room. My husband is teaching for 30mins out there once a week, but he has to teach around the bookcases, unused kids toys, dressing table and display unit that I haven’t got around to selling yet! I’m grateful for the space to put the things I need to sell, but by having somewhere to store them, I just forget to list them online…definitely don’t have more rooms than you need!
We have two spare rooms- the little box room is the knitting/sewing room, and has a futon and tall chest of drawers (containing yarn) in it. Plus a tiny table for my tiny sewing machine. It is not very minimalist though, as it also has baskets of fabric and so on in it! I am working my way through that all though, so eventually I won’t have such a stash and the room will be neater. I did paint it cream, rather than the original dark red, so it feels much calmer and more spacious.
The other room is a double- with fitted wardrobes and drawers. One wardrobe is full of the bfs work uniform (military, lots of uniform!) and some of the drawers contain his junk/ treasured possessions. I have tried to keep our stuff out of that room though, so there is not a panic when guests are coming, and so that if in the future we have kids, we don’t have to have a massive clear out to give them their own room. (I’ve watched friends with excess stuff struggle to find space to fit guests in the guest room with all the stuff, and having a huge task when faced with making the nursery habitable- things I’d like to avoid!
It is SO easy though when it is a room you don’t need to go into often- out of sight, out of mind…
We have a guest room now. It’s used for guests 🙂 My brother is staying with us for two months now. There is a guest bed/sofa, a closet (empty) , a built-desk, a night table, two chairs, and book cases, which are currently full of my dad’s books. I’m waiting for him to go through them. I kinda want to get rid of the book cases, as we don’t need them. And the guests never use the closet but live out of a suitcase or back bag, so that is just wasting space too.. We have twice as much space here in the house than the apartment before, and the storage space seems excessive. I have no need to store things in the guest room… Anyway, I love the clean, austere look myself, and I wonder if my guests would like it if there was just the bed, night table, two chairs and built-in desk (which is nothing more than a slice of white painted plywood attached to one corner)? We may need to keep a small part of the book cases.. Oh, and there is a small oriental rug, and a painting by a friend from art school.
I had two spare spaces in my last house and I kept them bare and empty, completely! All of my clutter was out in the open, in the living spaces. I’m minimal and organized, but also a little lazy (why I love minimalism!) Our “landing” areas grow exponentially on the weekends and they are my sorest point of clutter.
I’m always reminded of something I learned in college: Nature abhors a vacuum. So yes, if you have the space, you will fill it. And sparse/empty/minimally filled spaces can be beautiful!
We are most definitely guilty! It is our small basement and we are making progress but…..it is a definite project for this winter. As for the challenge, I’ve spent the summer with a major decluttering of our school year schedule in terms of meal planning changes, further decluttering of our rooms to continue to simplify cleaning, setting the girls up with their chore routine (They are old enough now to help and have mama feel the relief! So exciting!) and convincing dad that routine is crucial to overall health and wellbeing. I am feeling pretty good about it all but have an underlying nervousness questioning if I covered all of my bases….SO, I will be joining the challenge to add finishing touches as school begins. The last couple of years have been challenging, although increasingly better by year as we seriously get rid of the unnecessary ‘whatevers’ in our lives made busy by school and work. I don’t know that I can ever be too ready. Thanks for the post and the announcement of the challenge. I am excited for some outside motivation!
I have a storage locker in the basement that is my version of the above. Organized in plastic stackable storage bins – up to the ceiling, right up to the door! I even had a spreadsheet of what was in each box and just had to look up what I needed. When I realized the item I needed was in the back at the bottom – it became too much trouble to dig through to fetch it. Took me YEARS to realize this mental burden, always knowing it was there even if I did not see it – had to be culled. Thankfully I found your blog and that gave me the kick start I needed (no pregnancy fatigue here, sadly). I’ve sold, donated the bulk of it. Just a little bit left that I am still trying to sell. In the rest of my small flat – I still struggle to make room for things I want to keep and still use, without making the place look full.
A fine line for extra space or an extra room – a blessing when it is used for a real purpose and can help store items that you truly want out of sight but still need (like that guest bed!), but a curse when it becomes a junk storage bin / room.
Our large spare room used to be just a pile of stuff I didn’t want to and didn’t know how to deal with! Unused wedding gifts, high school trophies, old cds, etc. We’re expecting our first in December, and as my pregnancy progresses I find myself nesting. Fortunately my version of nesting is basically donating anything we don’t use. That room filled with stuff is now a clean, sleek, minimalist guest room and I love it!
More room for the baby to run around the house 🙂
Now I just need to convince my husband to donate all of his old college posters stuffed in the closet…
Our spare room has never been the problem but until June, the third and smallest bedroom in our house was my craft room. I think I was able to use it about 3 times since it was always too full of overflow junk from the rest of the house to actually be able to sew or make things in there. We have a baby on the way though so that room got converted to his room-to-be and I had to pare down the stuff in there. Most of it is still in boxes in the basement but I’m pretty sure I can legitimately blame 3rd trimester fatigue for that one!