life in a tiny apartment.

Tip #151: You already know what to do.

I’m in a Spring cleaning kind of mood and with that comes a bit of Spring mess-making. It’s the time of year when I can’t help myself but to buy up spring bulbs at the farmer’s market and bring them back to my tiny apartment to get muddy with. I realize that I’m likely one of few people on the internet who could gawk at photos of delicate muscari and tiny narcissus all day and be content, but here we are. 

I’ve written a fair bit in this series about making the most out of limited space and limited access to the great outdoors. In a post that’s now so old that it refers to James as my boyfriend, I mentioned that it’s helpful to think of the city as your living room. In another post that features a 23-month-old Faye in all her pantless glory, I suggested embracing messes and getting yourself a drop cloth. This weekend I potted these spring plants and uncovered an entire family spiders had taken up residence in the bag of soil I keep in a metal tin in our linen closet. (Luckily, it wasn’t my first time at the bug rodeo.)

I was home by myself when the spiders emerged. (James and children on a mission to climb every stranger’s stoop in Brooklyn.) I vacuumed them up. I doused their tin in the combination of Castile soap and water that I call our all-purpose spray. I called my mom and asked if her if she thought I needed to dump the remaining soil and before I let her answer me, I convinced myself that yes, indeed, keeping a bag of spider-filled soil in a small apartment (or anywhere) probably isn’t worth the cubic foot of dirt.

What’s the point? I already knew the answer to my spider query. I just had to talk my way through it.

I get so many emails from readers, and I promise I do my best to answer them, but over and over again, I think the answers lie in the questions themselves. You can problem-solve a tiny apartment for the entirety of the time that you live in it. Indeed, you probably will. There’s no end game here. Life keeps evolving. Spider eggs hatch. Babies grow into kids. Spaces are mutable. We’re all in a process of feeling comfortable in our skin and in our own homes and there’s not one answer that’s gonna unlock a secret that changes everything. So while we’re all busily readying our minds and homes for a new season, here’s a reminder that I don’t have very many perfect answers, but I can lend a bit of encouragement to make tiny fixes, and add green things, and make the bed. If gawking at daffs is what helps, do that. It’s sure helped me, spiders and all.

Tiny apartment survival tips #1-#150 right this way.