by Tricia
I’ve heard of people selling their larger home and moving into a smaller home. In the process, they save a lot of money and time. There’s less house to heat/cool and less to clean!
There’s no way that we would be able to go through a move right now. The real estate market in my area is over saturated and selling our home would be very tough. Although buying a home would be pretty easy because there are so many available, there’s no way we could afford two mortgages and our home would need more repair before we could think of renting it out.
So what do you do?
What we are going to do is maximize the current use of our home. That means closing up some rooms and moving things around.
Our home is around 1,100 square feet and has three bedrooms. My husband and I have a bedroom as does my son. The third bedroom is my home office. I need a space where I can close the door and avoid household noises (for telephone calls). The bedroom that my office is in is not heated. For some reason, no one ran heat up to that room. I used a space heater a little bit last year, but I learned how much electricity those things take. It’s a lot.
My son’s room is the biggest bedroom in the house and it gets the morning sun. Mom and dad’s room is on the other side of the house and gets the evening sun. We are going to do a switcheroo. Then, my home office is moving into our bedroom since there is enough room to have a desk as well as our full size bed.
With doing this, I will now have the sun in my office/bedroom in the morning (I didn’t have that before) and that will help keep me warm upstairs so the heat can be set lower during the day. Soon after my son gets home from school, the sun will be shining into his bedroom so that will help heat his room for when he is playing in it. My old home office can be closed off completely.
We are still thinking of ways we can maximize the downstairs use of our home. It doesn’t have the best layout, but we could possibly move my husband’s office (which is technically a dining room) to our living room. When someone built the addition where our living room is located, they didn’t think about insulating it well. The room gets very cold in the winter. Moving my hubby into the living room will help him keep warmer and he will not have to use a space heater. But our living room is small so it will take some creativity to make it work.
It’s sort of fun trying to do this…trying to purposefully shrink what you have now to see what you can comfortably live with. In the process, we’ll save some money on our heating bill this winter 😉
