Live small, live tidy

“Space, the final frontier. To boldly go where no man has been before”. Cue music.

Though we haven’t done any real voyages yet, Space is…… well, missing!
Alice had it right when she found the ‘drink me’ bottle and shrank.
All our worries would be over if we could find such magic.

One thing about living in a small space, you can’t be untidy.

When we first set up home together, we rented a one bedroom flat (apartment) which was actually the downstairs of a converted house. We had a lounge, kitchen diner, bedroom and what had originally been an outside coal shed had been joined to the property by a corridor, and thus provided us with a bathroom and separate loo.
We had little in the way of furniture, and borrowed a three-piece suite from Other Brother, the couch of which converted to a double bed should we ever have anyone stay over.
After six months, our landlord put the rent up by over 25%, and what with the dreaded Poll Tax coming in that year, we had to find an extra £100 a month, money we simply didn’t have.
We decided to buy a house as my job entitled me to a mortgage subsidy which made us better off financially.
We bought our one bedroom ‘box’, our term for one of four cluster homes built back to back, where everyone had a corner and only two outside walls.
The suite didn’t fit through the front door and was returned, so we purchased a cheap frameless futon to sit on. Most of our evenings were spent pushing it back together as we kept sliding to the floor!

Our second house purchase was a three bed semi, and I had plans for that, there was so much R O O M.
However, our neighbours went on a six month cruise and ‘rented’ their home to family. We had to suffer all night parties, loud music, comings and goings at all hours, and so less than two years later, we’d purchased a detached property instead.
We lived in our bungalow for almost 9 years before moving on to (eventually) Lincolnshire to follow a dream that never materialised either.

Rather than cover old ground with the events leading up to where we are now, I shall leap forward to today.

Space here is extremely limited, though we are doing surprisingly well.
The problems come when we want to do something other than blog, read, eat, or sleep.
To make working space means moving things.
Moving things means clutter and piling things up somewhere else.
Piles of things mean a mess.
Mess is untidy.
Therefore you cannot live in a small space and be untidy. It just does not work.
Add to that you cannot do anything else without moving something to get where you or the dog want to go/sit/lie and, let’s just say, tempers shorten.

Hubby is a patient guy.
Sure, he gets frustrated, but he rarely ‘loses it’.
Unless he’s in a confined space and can’t find things.
He can’t find things because something he’s recently moved to make space has buried it.
And because he can’t find what he needs at the time, things start to go wrong.

Best to make myself scarce and let him get it out of his system.