5 Reasons to Love Small House Living

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Growing up I wasn’t planning on living in a small house. I had a dream of a two-story farmhouse with a wrap around porch. I was going to have a big kitchen with lots of cupboards, bedrooms with walk in closets, and bathrooms with tubs with legs. By now you can already tell where this is going…I didn’t get my dream house when I got married.

My husband and I bought his great-grandma’s small house with the intention of living there for a couple of years while we saved money and then we were going to find something bigger or build. Then five months after we got married we got a surprise….Seth joined our family just after our first anniversary.

Bills started piling up from his birth and the subsequent surgery I had to remove the uterine septum found during his delivery. At that point my Ben and I decided that we would be here a bit longer…now six years, three more babies, more surgeries, an addition, two new used vehicles, and lots of money later we are still here. In our first little home. It looks much different now. And we have lots of plans for improvement of the land and the house. We made this small house that we weren’t going to stay in for long ours. And we love it.

Maybe you are in that big house now and you are thinking about downsizing. Maybe you are getting married in a few months and you are looking at homes but don’t care for the prices of those larger houses. Maybe you are on a journey to live with less and becoming more minimalistic has shown you that you want a smaller house. No matter why you are here reading now, I want to share with you my top five reasons to love small house living.

A smaller house is super easy to clean.

This makes sense, right? With less wall space and room, it is pretty obvious that a small house would be easier to clean. How much easier? Well, if I have someone watch my boys for four hours, and I just hit the cleaning hard, I can deep clean half of our 1,120 square foot home. This includes washing walls and windows, dusting, moving furniture, etc. A small house is usually pretty easy to keep up with.

I always know where the littles are.

I can hear my boys everywhere in the house. If I can’t hear them, there is something wrong. Someone is getting into trouble. We just moved our oldest two into a basement bedroom and even there I can hear pretty much everything that goes on. {They are boys after all…not too quiet.}

It is easy to know when we have extra things to get rid of.

I recently read The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. So good!! I immediately wanted to purge the whole house. I didn’t agree with all of the things in the book, but overall the message is helpful for those who are looking to get rid of extra stuff.

Having a small house makes it easier to know when there is extra stuff. This doesn’t mean that we don’t get clutter or extra stuff, believe me, we do! But it is easier to see when things aren’t fitting and when we need to go through things without mercy.

 

We can never get away from each other.

I have a pillow on our couch with this poem on it

“Love grows best in little houses, with fewer walls to separate.

Where you eat and sleep so close together, you can’t help but communicate.

And if we had more room between us, think of all we’d miss.

Love grows best in little houses just like this.”

And it is so true!! We can’t get away from each other in our small house. If someone is upset, the others know about it. We have to talk about things. We have to work things out, otherwise the house echoes with stress and tension. Our small house improves our relationships as a family.

We spend more time outside.

When the weather is nice, and even sometimes when it isn’t the best, we are outside more. I’ll be honest and say I’m not out too much in the winter, but during the summer we are on the deck, or doing something outside. I’m pretty sure that if the house was bigger we would not spend as much time outside.

These are my top reasons for loving living in a small house. If you live in a small house, why do you love it?

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