My name is Alison Mazurek and this is our 600 square foot apartment. My husband and I bought about nine years ago and since then have added two kids to the
space. Theo is now five and a half Mae is two and a half and we live in Mount Pleasant in Vancouver. I felt like when I got pregnant I combed the internet, trying to find
inspiration and information about how you have a baby in a small space,
like where does the change table go, what do you do about a crib? I
needed the details, and so I thought if I could figure it out and it works for us, I just made a promise to myself that I would share about it because I
felt really alone when we were choosing to stay in our small space. And everyone
thought, it'll never work you'll never do it, and it's really worked for
us. I feel like there's a lot of shame or embarrassment if you choose to live in
an apartment with kids, like somehow you're depriving them.
I don't think
our kids are deprived, I feel like they're very lucky. They get to go to art
classes up the street, and they go to Science World, and they're at parks and they're engaged in the community, as opposed to it being that
they're only at home and they're only in the backyard and we drive everywhere. We walk everywhere, we scoot everywhere, and I feel like it's a pretty
good life.
So this is our at 600 square foot home that I share with my
husband and our two kids. This is our tiny entry. So to take advantage of our
higher ceilings we put in these shelves so that we can display a few nicer
things. We have a dining table and when we first got the apartment it actually had
a full-sized island that we removed because we really wanted to have
somewhere to sit down and have proper dinners. This is our kitchen. We have
taken advantage of the high ceilings by putting the few books that we have up
top there; cookbooks and just any books that have some meaning to us that we're
not willing to let go of.
We move the ottoman out of the way at night and then
just hold down the bed and remove the straps and that's our bed. And then again taking advantage of the height we have a bunch
of plants above because they get good light up there and then they're also not
taking up floor space that we can't really spare. I've chosen to keep this
area open instead of adding more furniture because it makes the
space feel bigger to me and also it's just another place for the kids to play. They bring their toys out from the room and play here and then we have the
other really soft rug over here. I found with the new sofa layout they're
playing here as well. With the open modular sofa we can seat a lot of
people on it and it's cozy and then we end up on the floor.
Then we have a
couple side tables that we move around. Sometimes one's here, sometimes it's
here, sometimes it's there, to put drinks or food on. The longer we've
lived small and the more little people we've added to it, the more furniture we remove. We actually had a bigger sofa in here
before and I was just ready for a change and I love the idea of a modular sofa. I was actually keeping my eye on Article for months waiting for
the perfect modular sofa and when this one came out I was like, "Done. This is it." I obsessively worked on the layout because we have this sort of strange
window ledge, and I knew that it's a great spot to
put a drink, like coffee or wine.
I come from the train of thought
that more couch is better in a small space as opposed to less couch because we spend the majority of our time in this living room. We're reading books,
we're watching movies, we're playing, they're jumping. We spend all our time here and so I wanted enough room for our family of
four to be able to sit on here and also friends, lots of kids, and I needed
it to be hard-wearing and comfortable.
Then when we have
movie nights we pull this one right in here and it makes this giant couch
bed and the kids get really excited. We project a movie
onto the wall bed so I feel like it's our little like theater room. I think more than anything it's choosing to be happy with what you
have.
I think as I've gotten older and had kids it's just made me
realize that, yeah we have a small space, but it's beautiful and we live in
an amazing city in Canada. We just have so much to be grateful for. We're
super privileged. So we can't afford a free-standing home, but we have this
beautiful small home in a great neighborhood surrounded by diversity and opportunity. Whether we have two
bedrooms or five bedrooms, it doesn't really matter..