Survival Tip #163: List the pros. We moved. Just temporarily. While a damaged wall and the associated peeling paint in our apartment gets repaired, we’re one flight down, in a space nearly identical to…
Survival Tip #162: Where do you put the people? Where do you put all your stuff? It makes sense that most tiny apartment queries I get have to do with managing the stuff in a…
Survival Tip #161: Take Your Small Apartment One Day at a Time. Monday: Give fresh water and fresh cuts to grocery store flowers. Precious treatment for $2.99 stems chosen by a three-year-old and bought…
Survival Tip #160: Revisit the spaces you’ve resigned yourself to. Next month, it will be four years since we first rented this apartment. Four years since, while pregnant with Faye, I climbed onto the…
Survival Tip #159: Put your Christmas tree in a crate. Last week, on Thursday, after both kids were fast asleep, James and I poured a festive glass of cider and sat down to scribble…
Survival Tip #158: Get Stubborn/Find Room. This summer, we finally caved and got a window air conditioner. After the third consecutive June night where temperatures in our apartment were just shy of 100 degrees,…
#157 Give Yourself a Sick Day I spent much of my childhood engaged in long drawn-out games of make-believe. Some of these games featured bucolic scenarios of apple picking or making feasts of mud…
Survival Tip #156: Make it sized to fit. On Saturday night, we ate spaghetti. There were two big white bowls filled with pasta smothered in Marcella Hazan’s famous sauce, a smaller wooden one, filled with…
Survival Tip #155: Call yourself whatever you please. Over the weekend, a morning walk to the farmers’ market got us a basket full of fresh vegetables and a dusty wooden crate that a neighbor filling…
Tip #154: Spread a little cheer. This morning, the muscles on the underside of my forearms are aching. They’re tender from overuse this weekend, being put to work on tiny apartment improvements that didn’t…