How about some happiness? 

Travis and I had our realtor friend (the same realtor who helped us buy this house) over for dinner last weekend to talk about our selling/buying plans. After discussing what we're looking for , she suggested we start looking at homes sooner rather than later.  She thinks seeing some homes in person will help us narrow exactly what we're looking for. We spent a large chunk of the past few days poring over listings and compiling Must See and Might See lists from the 70ish homes in our price range and disered size. The Must See list is significantly shorter, but has some really exciting possibilities. We start on Saturday with four homes.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

She also gave us the dose of reality that we'll very likely have to lose some money on this house because of the current market and what houses are selling for in our neighborhood.  Thankfully we purchased small and made a decent downpayment, so it won't be as much as it could have been.

I'm so excited to go see homes that it makes my stomach go all fluttery.  I love, love, love to look at houses and seeing a few at a time over the next few months will be such a fun, low-stress way to look for our next home.  As opposed to the last time when we had two days to find this one.  I will admit I'm a little nervous that we'll find what we're looking for right away and then have to wait several months to move on it, risking someone else making an offer.  But I'm also confident that God has chosen our home and if it's currently on the market then it will stay there until it's time for us to move.

Let the fun begin!

I've been looking for some time for a jewelry box to hold and display my smaller jewelry on my dresser.  I've priced them in stores but wasn't ever willing to pay the $30 - $50 pricetag for something with lots of individual compartments and drawers instead of just a small box with a lid.

Have I mentioned how much I love to garage sale?  Because this little beauty was all of $3.

Oh, you don't think she's beautiful with her scratched wood and gold hardware and tan velvet lining? 

Yeah, me neither.

But she was cheap and I knew she could be pretty with a little paint and creativity.

See?

I gave the outside three coats of white paint and used black craft paint, a coat of polyurithane for shine, and a teeny brush to update the little brass hardware. 

Befores and Afters:

 The top lid flips up and to add contrast and pop, I painted the inside of the lid black instead of white.

A little flair comes from black and white patterned velvet wrapping paper, cut to fit and used as liners.

Not bad for $3!

This is our last post on Small Space Living and it's about keeping the clutter in your home under control.  Corraling clutter is applicable to living in a home of any size, but is especially important when you live in a small space.  You only have so much room in which to do all your living, eating, playing, storing.....why spend your time working around things that add visual stress and take up that precious space?  A few tips for corraling the clutter in your home:

1) When you have things that need to stay out for easy access or because you're out of drawer/cabinet space, contain them.

These are my not-yet-read magazines and scrapbook idea books that I want to keep.  Instead of a stack on the floor, they live in this basket tucked into a corner next to my love seat. 

These are James' daily eating supplies - silverware, bowls, cups, oatmeal.  I cannot cram them into my full cupboards so they live on the counter.  And they drive me bonkers.

But don't they look better in their own little container?  I can live with it this way.

2) Sacrifice valuable cabinet/drawer space to keep your uglies out of sight. 

I like yellow as much as the next person but my phone book does not need to be kept on display on my counter.  And cell phone chargers may be necessary but leaving them plugged in and snaking all over my kitchen isn't the vibe I'm going for.  Instead I chose to give up a valuable drawer to hold things that I need to access regularly but aren't attractive.

This is the shelf Travis made for our desk, as a temporary solution for our make-shift office space.

This is the pile of receipts, user manuals, important papers and bills, all of our spare paper, lables, folders and various sundry office supplies that used to live in a stack on top of the printer.  Hiding it away from the guests who sleep in this room gives me great pleasure.

3) Create a phone station.

It's so easy to let coupons, mail, pens, scraps of paper with phone numbers scribbled on them, that spare pair of scissors, To Do lists, post-it notes, and pads of paper take over that little corner of your home dedicated to the phone.  And next thing you know you're sifting through Arby's coupons and doctor's appointment cards looking for the recipe you jotted down last time you talked to your Grandma.  Or maybe that's just me.  Enter, the phone station.

A $.50 ceramic planter from Menards, a $1 napkin holder from Big Lots, talking the husband into mounting the phone on the wall, and a quick Do-it-Yourself message board and voila!  A clutter-free counter.  Coupons and note pads go into the napkin holder.  Pens and scissors live in the jar.  And the message board is just package of cork board and a simple black frame bought at Wal-Mart for about $3 total.  I just trimmed the cork to the right size and stuck it in the back of the frame instead of the plexiglass.  Now all my phone numbers, jotted notes, and business cards have a place to hang out until I don't need them anymore.

And that ends our series on Small Space Living!  I'm sure some of you are quietly sighing "finally", but I've enjoyed it.  Go forth and corral your clutter!

Our next-to-last Small Space post is about finding the balance in what you keep out and what you keep away.  When you have limited storage sometimes it makes sense to find the pretty things and rather than find a hiding place for them, put them on display.  Small Space Tip:  Display your disposables (Cavaet: If they're nice to look at. A box of Kotex isn't going to add much to your aesthetic.)

Remember this?

I have two drawers in my bathroom.  So instead of filling one of those precious drawers with disposable makeup supplies I arranged white cotton swabs and q-tips in candleholders, spray painted a little shelf, and made them decor.  Not only are they easy to access on a daily basis but they look purposeful instead of like clutter.

No room is better suited to displaying disposables than your kitchen, with all those groceries.  Fresh fruit arranged on a $1 Goodwill candleholder that I painted white makes a simple centerpiece. Plus, have you noticed that fresh produce, like a living plant, adds a little life to your room?  It's an easy, organic touch that freshens a room and chases away that overly-arranged look.

This cereal dispenser gets more comments than anything else in my house.  It was on clearance at Brylane Home last year and holds an oversized box of cereal in each container.  My Mom calls it my continential breakfast station.

What to do with all those jars of food for your little one?  That's a fruit bowl of baby food tucked away under the cabinet.  So much tidier than stacking all those little jars in rows and technically it's still holding fruit.

Get the idea?  What pretty disposables do you have that you can put on display in a creative way until you need them?

The other side of this coin is figuring out what to hide.  I am a big, big, BIG proponent of hiding most of your media.  DVDs, VHS tapes, CDs, and video games all come in bright plasticy packaging that usually adds visual clutter to a space.  And when you're dealing with a small space you should try to minimize clutter.  The exception to this rule is books - I love to see books on display, especially if you remove the brightly colored dust jackets to show the muted cloth covers.

Anyway, how to hide all those DVDs?  In our apartment we had an open-shelved entertainment center for which I bought baskets to hold our DVD collection.  When we moved here we gave up the entertainment center for the floor space so I had to come up with another way to hide our media.  After a few weeks of looking I found these two cabinets (yep, there are two squished together to look like one) at Big Lots. They were leftovers from one of those expensive modular closet systems.  (Shockingly, I put them together myself and they're still standing 2 years later!)

And doesn't that simple exterior look so much better than if we had this on display in our living space?

Our CDs found a new home here:

This chest sits behind our couch in the living room, like a sofa table.  I was originally going to use it to store extra blankets but instead decided to hide away all of our CDs.  This as come in super-duper handy now that we have a small person who looooooves to seperate those shiny discs from their cases. 

What creative ways do you hide your media?

This is post number three out of five on small space living and today's topic is taking advantage of those awkward spaces in your home.  It would be easy to write off the nooks and crannies as unusable, and if you live in a big, airy home you can do just that.  But small space dwellers are always looking for ways to creatively and yet still attractively take advantage of every inch of their space.  What we do NOT want to do is shove things into every corner and overrun our homes with piles of things, but we DO want to use what we have to its fullest potential for both storage and to make your home pretty.

Let's start with some fairly obvious spaces that most of you probably already utilize.

1) Under the bed.  I don't have a picture of this one because well, it's under the bed.  But anyone who's ever lived in a dorm room knows the power of under the bed storage.  Buy those long and shallow storage containers and wave bye bye to shifting through your off-season clothes in your tiny, overcrowded closet.

2) Behind the door.  Here is a picture of behind my bedroom door:

When the renovators of our home turned the master bedroom's walk-in closet into the second bathroom, they had to carve out some of the room to install a smaller closet.  That left this awkward little space behind the door that is hidden anytime the door is open.  I added a full-length mirror (hi, James' fingerprints!), situated my jewelry box to free up dresser space, bought inexpensive over-the-door stretchy clips for hanging belts, scarves and purses, and installed a small coat rack to hang my bulky jewelry that won't fit comfortably into my jewelry box.  Now, instead of wasted space I have an extension of my closet that is hidden from everyday life.

3) Above the fridge.  Most people use the tops of their fridges as decor space or extra storage, so this is no huge revelation.  But if you're using it as added pantry space like I am, consider buying large totes or baskets to hide away your goodies.  Snap, Crackle, and Pop may be cute but they hardly add to your decor.  Unless of course you have some kind of elf/gnome/cartoon character theme going on in your kitchen and then we need to have a whole different kind of talk.

I bought these totes from Big Lots for $4 a piece about 20 minutes after we moved in and promptly hid away all of our bagged and boxed snacks and breakfast items.  I made the little slip-in lables with construction paper and a silver pen to add a touch of whimsy.

4) The tops of your cabinets.  Now, do NOT take this as a suggestion to line the tops of your kitchen cabinets with canned goods or bags of chips.  Remember, Tostitos is not a decorating style.  However if you have large, flat items like platters that don't fit into your narrow cabinets, why not put them here?

See that little white thingy on top of the corner cabinet?  I poufed it up a bit so you could see it, normally it's completely out of sight.  That is the oversized platter from my Christmas dishes that doesn't fit anywhere else.  So it lives up, out of sight, and covered with a spare towel to keep the dust from accumulating until the time it's needed.   You could store placemats, seasonal dishes, platters, the options for flat, hidable kitchen items are almost endless!  And if you happen to have a collection of pretty white dishes you could easily put a few of them on display up there without cluttering up your kitchen.

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The next pictures show areas unique to our home but that might spark an idea for your space.

Our master bathroom (the one that used to be a walk-in closet) is long and narrow and comes with very little built-in storage.  We have the vanity cabinet and a wall-mounted medicine cabinet and that's it.  So where to store things like towels?  How about here:

Spot them?  We hung two towel bars in that tiny little unusable space left over by the shower.  Because both shower doors slide open I can reach for my towel and dry off before I ever leave the shower.  Extra towels are arranged here:

These are $5 bins from Wal-Mart that lock together to create floating storage for extra TP and spare towels that otherwise would consume my entire vanity cabinet.  I've been on the lookout for a large yet affordable  woven felt basket to sit in this spot instead, but no luck so far.

And just for fun, here's a shot of the top of the medicine cabinet which until a few months ago, was bare.  And until then our bathroom always looked unfinished because there were no personal touches.  A quick flower arrangement in a garage sale vase and a couple of framed pictures finishes out the space without cluttering it up.

Here is another awkward space, this time above our stove:

It isn't tall enough to fit a microwave (thought that would have been lovely, to get it off of the counter) so instead I keep my most-used cookbooks and recipe book on display for easy access.  My original idea for use of this space would have been to install a hanging glass rack and display our stemware.  But due to its custom size we could never find one that fit and upon second thought, I wouldn't want to have to rinse cooking grease off of our glasses evertime we use them.

This little corner is a little more crowded than I'd like, but it's the best I can do for my craft supplies:

This rolling cart with canvas bins (barely) holds my scrapbooking and stamping supplies and while not the most attractive solution, keeps them accessible for when I do find time to sit down with my long overdue projects.  But where, you fellow scrappers ask, do I keep my paper?  Every scrapbooker has a stash of paper.  Mine is here:

That would be the quilt rack my Dad made for me, which sits behind our love seat.  And right now it does double duty in holding our many, many, many Cleveland Browns themed blankets (note to self: talk to Travis about paring that stack down) but it also hides away my paper keepers behind said blankets so we're not tripping over them.  Seriously, you lift or move anything in this house and you'll find something hiding there, stored out of sight.  And I wonder where James gets those racoonish tendencies. 

How have you used your awkward spaces?  Care to show us?