life in a tiny apartment.

Tip #125: Give yourself five minutes to make a teeny tiny fix. 

On the face of it, this is a post wherein I encourage you to trim a little piece of paper down to size and to use a bit of glue to stick it over anything offending your senses in your home. In true blogger style, I’ve even provided little close-up images of the process, such that it is. You don’t need photos to tell you that the top of a glass makes for the best guide for tracing a circle. Nor did I really have to let you in on my extra-fussy-step of rubber stamping a wave in metallic ink. But the whole point of a blog is to find a bit of magic in the ordinary so I photographed all of that for you, just in case it’s what you needed to brighten up our Wednesday.

Really, this is a post about doing something teeny tiny to make yourself feel better about your space. It’s about taking an action, whether that’s taking out the trash or gluing kraft paper onto your fan.

Maybe you’re like me. Maybe you have two new New York City hardware store fans in your attic apartment blowing hot air around and you’re feeling like you’d really rather not look at the ARCTIC WIND TM stickers stuck askew onto the center of your fans. Maybe covering up those stickers with a bit of inoffensive brown paper is just what you need to do make your little corner feel more harmonious. Maybe you decided to get crazy with a rubber stamp. Maybe it still only took you five minutes to make a teeny tiny fix.

We’re so often encouraged to think big. In small spaces or much larger ones, there’s a home improvement culture that tells us that if we only had a whole new something or other that our home would be better. We’re told that ripping out the counter, or taking down a wall, or getting new kitchen appliances would be the change to make a space feel like our own. Don’t get me wrong: all of those things would be incredibly effective in changing a space. And if I could put a skylight up in this place and redesign the kitchen and bathroom I would be psyched. 

But in the meantime, I think that teeny tiny improvements can go just as far, if we let them. You can scrape the paint off your rental window pane and change your view. You can remove a sticker from a stereo and change the look of an entire bookshelf. You can use a twist-tie to wrangle computer cords and end up with a desk that feels brand new.
Here’s a post for my fellow tiny fixers out there. To anyone else hankering to fix even the tiniest speck of something that’s not quite right, this is for you too. I submit that I’m likely the only dingbat gluing paper to my fans, but on the chance that I’m not, I’d love to hear from you. And because maybe this will be fun, I thought we could use the hashtag #teenytinyfix to keep track of our teeny tiny home improvements on Instagram. What tiny thing have you done lately to make your space feel just a little bit better?

I’m still sharing images (along with a few benevolent interlopers) with the #lifeinatinyapartment hashtag that I started a few years ago to catalog our home, but I thought that #teenytinyfix would be a fun way to keep track of each other’s efforts in a more communal space. What do you think? Up for cataloging your #teenytinyfix?

In case you’re curious:
These fans have managed to maintain an almost non-existent small online presence, but you can find them at Basics Plus Hardware stores around NYC.
And yes, we’re still rocking in the free world without air conditioning.

Tiny apartment survival tips #1 – 123, RIGHT HERE.