Tip #171: Ditch your ironing board. I’m sure I’ve said it before: You don’t need much of anything small-space specific to get by in a small space. But sometimes having something specific helps. Mostly,…
It’s a chief joy of mine to find something that someone else discarded and to make it mine. One woman’s trash becomes another’s treasure and not much of anything goes to waste. With the…
Tip #167: Hang up your swimsuits. It’s splash pad season. That season in the life of a city kid—and the adults who care for them—when parks turn on their sprinklers and children run pell-mell…
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…