Working Hard

It's been a bit longer than I meant for it to be. I've been quite sick so work stalled a little bit. We still haven't quite finished the floor! Here's a quick photo though of how it looks. It's so hard to take a good pic given how tiny the room is but I did my best haha.

The plan is to finish the floor off this weekend and then hopefully next weekend we should be able to start on the boys new room :)

Getting Our Hands Dirty

We started work today on the "Master" bedroom, and it feels so good to finally be able to do something. Had a quick trip to Bunnings last night for the paint, plaster fill and brushes/rollers so that we were prepared. I ended up changing my mind on the paint colour (I always change my mind haha) and went with French Limestone. I love the look of it so hopefully it's just as nice on the walls! The Pale Sage was just a little darker than I had wanted whereas this colour is lighter but still the green I wanted.

Then yesterday morning we emptied the room out of the kids toys. This turned out to be a bigger job than I thought as there were toys all over the ground and then we had to find places to put them all whilst we worked!

After the room was clean we set out with a heatgun and scraper removing the wooden name sign and butterflies that were on the wall from when it was Ashley's room. We also took down shelves and picture hooks.

Next we filled in the holes and cracks with plaster filler and went on a trip to KMart whilst it dried. The boys were desperately in need of new clothes as they won't stop growing and Willow needed a few more winter clothes. I also stopped in at Harvey Norman for a look. I could browse the furniture there all day I reckon. They have some really nice stuff but not really in our meager budget ;)

When we returned home my husband sanded the walls whilst I fed Willow but unfortunately not all the plaster had dried so painting couldn't start until today.

The walls are now done :D but pictures will have to come next time sorry!

Making a Start

I'm going to make a start on the renovations by doing up the smallest room (our soon-to-be bedroom). I am so excited to finally have something to do on the house haha. This room will be easiest to start with as at the moment it's just full of toys in containers. My daughter was sleeping in there but she was lonely so we moved her bed into the boys room for a temporary fix until Willow was old enough to share with her. I currently co sleep whilst I breastfeed so it will be a little while yet but not too long.

So this weekend I plan to unscrew shelves, remove the butterfly decorations from the walls and paint. I'm currently thinking of going with Pale sage by Dulux:

I think a soft green is a good choice for a bedroom and this colour is nice and light. Given the room is so tiny anything too dark would make it feel like a cave I reckon.

This room is also the only one without floorboards. We think it used to be the laundry before they moved it out to the shed. I've found some laminate boards I like at Bunnings though which should match pretty well and most importantly are affordable!

I'll be sure to take pictures whilst I work! Hopefully it won't take very long given it's size. One advantage to a small house haha.

Bedroom Configuration

One of the hardest decisions has been trying to work out who goes where when it comes to bedrooms. We have what I call 2 and a half bedrooms. Two bedrooms are pretty large for the house but the third bedroom is tiny and actually is accessed off the second bedroom. You can see from these pictures how small it is given the cot starts against one wall and goes almost to the opposite wall.

It's a given that everyone was going to have to share with someone the plan was for Sebastian and Ethan to share one room, Ashley and Willow to share one room and my husband and I to share the other room. The hard part was working out which room for which people.

In the end  my husband and I have decided to take the tiny room. This might seem strange to many people but it makes the most sense given we have the least amount of bedroom stuff. We can both share a bed and we don't have toys that need to be stored in our room. The only issue then was where we were going to put our clothes. Once you put a bed in that room that's big enough for two people you aren't really left with any more space. So after trawling Pinterest for heaps of great ideas:

We have decided on a semi loft bed with pull out drawers and hanging rack underneath. It keeps everything out of the way but still easily accessible. The only issue is we are going to have to build it ourselves as finding exactly what we require is near on impossible and getting one made would probably be a bit too much for our very small budget with everything else we need to do. Luckily my husband works in metal fabrication so can build the frame easily enough and we are both fairly handy at building things so fingers crossed this isn't a disaster haha. 

To make the most of the space we are also going to put a sliding barn door in, instead of the current door which swings inwards. That way the door doesn't need to be closed to access the under-bed wardrobe space. We'd also like to swap out the large window for a pair of glass doors and create a little secluded balconette area as it's at the back of the house. Hopefully that will help it seem a bigger space, as well as giving us an area just for us to escape from the kids on occasion ;)

Given the girls are younger and smaller we decided to put them in the adjoining bedroom, which looks like this currently (though I did repaint it a neutral colour awhile ago when we thought we might sell):

 I've found a cute, cheap bunk from Fantastic Furniture which will work well for both girls to sleep in:

 We will be having a built in wardrobe made for their room to store all their clothes. This should still leave enough room for storage for toys and things, I just need to figure out exactly what sort will work best.

That leaves the current master bedroom for the boys, which I don't seem to have photos of (at least not ones I can find in my mess of folders). Given they aren't far from becoming teenagers I think it makes sense for them to have the biggest room. My eldest, Sebastian, is already about my height at 12 and is only going to get bigger and Ethan is 10. We have thought about creating a suspended loft bed for Sebastian inspired by one I saw in an apartment on the My Scandinavian Home blog except with barriers around it so he doesn't fall out. 

I think it feels a bit more grown up than bunks and allows us to give the boys bigger beds to fit into as they keep growing. It also leaves underneath clear of poles making it easier to fit Ethan's bed and a desk underneath. However I'm not entirely sure how safe that is. May need to go back to the drawing board. Again we would have to make this as I doubt I could find something like this here- and definitely not in budget. They will also have built in wardrobes and some sort of storage solution for the rest of their stuff.

So there you have it. Our plans to squeeze our 6 bodies into our small home without it feeling like a squeeze :)

Scandinavian

I absolutely love Scandinavian style for interiors and I am planning on using Scandinavian homes and design as inspiration for our renovation. Scandinavian homes and apartments tend to be small and their weather isn't always very sunny so they utilise colour and design really well to make sure their spaces always seem bright and roomy. Given Tasmania is also quite cold and our house quite small I figure they are a great inspiration for getting the most out of our home. 

We have floorboards throughout which are great but not a colour I particularly like. Originally I considered staining them but I'd have to go darker and with our house being small I didn't want dark floors. So like many Scandinavian pictures I have browsed, I am planning on painting our floors white. I love how fresh they look (though that's not likely to last long with 6 people trampling all over them) and how they help bounce light. Love these pictures from My Scandinavian Home

Our walls for the main living areas I'll be keeping the same colour as I love it! It's called Limed White and is a soft Greige colour. Too much white would just get dirty very quickly by my kids and like I said, I adore this colour:

The bedrooms will be more colourful but I think a very neutral palette works well for the main living areas. I'll add colour in the soft furnishings.

In other news it's been 6 years today since my husband and I were hand fasted. We don't usually do much for our anniversary as we'd been together for quite a few years and had 3 of our children before we got married. I always tell people that the only reason we got married was to have a child free holiday for once (and I'm only half joking ;) ). Mostly we lazed around and took the kids to the park (Sebastian was pretending to be on some Black Ops mission or something- I figured it was better not to ask too many questions haha):

Happy 6 Year Anniversary to the love of my life:

And my partner in crime:

First (and Most Expensive) Jobs

I thought it would be easier to break down what we need to do to make our home meet our needs as their is so much. The first and most important jobs we need to do involve structural type work. It's hard to get that excited about structural stuff but it's very necessary in order to be able to transform our house into a place we are happy to be living in. 

Our major issues have always been the roof, lack of insulation and the wiring. Currently every time it rains we get two indoor water features (one in my room and one in the kitchen), our house is too warm in Summer and too cold in Winter and every time you try to watch TV, boil a kettle and cook toast at the same time the fuse blows. All fun and games when your house is small and there are six of you!

We are planning to do rewiring, reroofing (is that a word) and ceiling insulation at the same time. My husbands brother is luckily a builder so the plan is to pay him to do it. We have to replace like-for-like so we will be going colourbond. Once the old roof is off it should be easier to rewire and add ceiling insulation as our skillion roof provides no crawl space to access it internally.

The next stage will be to hopefully replace all our windows with double glazed ones as most of our external walls are covered with large windows. This should help a lot with the house temperature! Our newest plan is to replace the very large window at the front of our house with double glazed bifold doors. We have a large porch that we never use out the front as it's cut off from the house. By adding bifolds I am hoping we can really open the space in Summer and pretty much double the usable space in our Lounge area. The porch is currently wasted by being blocked off from the rest of the house.

There are also some weatherboards that we'd like to replace, not too many thank goodness and then we will get onto the things we can do ourselves- painting the exterior! This is the much more fun bit for me ;)

My colour scheme for the exterior is this:

Woodland Grey for the roof and guttering, Dieskau for the exterior walls, Vivid White for the trim around the doors and windows and a Delicious Mint door :) I am also planning on painting the porch in Woodland Grey and White as it's just bare concrete currently. Some inspiration pictures:

Now off to tend to my sick child who keeps trying to help me blog!

Introductions

Hello, my name is Sarah and I live with my husband and four children in Tasmania, Australia. I wanted to start this blog after discovering it was hard to find any blogs of large families living in small homes. Most blogs were either American, religious or couples/small families with young kids living in tiny homes. We aren't any of those. So instead I thought I would take this opportunity to document our own big family/small living journey.

 The Crazy Children

The house has two and a half bedrooms, one bathroom, one living room and a combined dining/kitchen. It has a grand total of 76.8m2 of living space, which the six of us have shared for 10 years. In Australia our houses' average size is around 250m2 and the average family has 2-3 kids. So 76.8m2 for a family of six is virtually unheard of.

Our House

Our house hasn't changed a lot over those years. We always had planned to extend so we were trying to get our home loan down to create more equity. Instead of doing the house up we were going to wait and spruce it up when we built more rooms and had a bigger home- we even had extension plans drawn up and approved. Then just recently I asked myself why? Why were we going to more than double our mortgage just to create more bedrooms and larger rooms? 

I realised our main problems wasn't sharing space. We have been doing it for 10 years and we've never had any issues with each other; in fact we are very close as a family as a result of our small house. Our real issues arose from a house that needed repairs, insulating, redecorating and from a lack of storage that 1950s houses often suffer from. All of these are things we could fix for a lot less than an extension plus doing these things would cost. We could save and do them in stages instead of needing a loan and we could have our small mortgage paid off in another 10 or so years instead of doubling it and not paying it off until we retired. It also means that we will be able to help our children with house deposits of first cars in the future hopefully as we will be financially better off. In the short term it means a life with more family holidays and no financial worries.

I decided it made a lot more sense to continue living in our small house and have the kids sharing bedrooms, than for all of us to have a larger house, a bedroom each and more stress. I spoke to my husband, he agreed and now we have decided to ditch the extension plans and work on making our own house the 'perfect' (small) house for our family.

So there you have it. The background as to the why of this blog! My nine month old daughter Willow is currently 'calling me' so I will have to save the how for next time :)