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 :)