Dining/Lounge Area

One of the biggest changes we have made is choosing to make our Lounge room more of a Dining room with seating area. Our dining table gets used a lot more than our couch- not just for eating but also board games and Dungeons and Dragons nights. So we decided we'd rather have our big dining table and a small seating area than a Lounge area and small Dining table.

We started work on it a few weeks ago and it is now nearing completion. The floor was sanded and painted with the same Feast Watson White Floor Paint as we have done in the other rooms :)

 

We did have a minor issue with the cat not understanding the words "KEEP OFF THE FLOOR"

 

The walls were painted in Dulux Silkwort and the trims and door in Malay Grey. I decided to go a darker trim because I love the look and I was hoping it will stand up better to kids grotty fingermarks than white did! My husband then painted the ceiling and also hung the chandelier we bought a few years ago above the dining table, replacing the horrible ceiling fan that used to be there.

 Then my favourite part, decorating!! I've spent quite a bit of money in at KMart lately haha. The homewares department is so very addictive and a nice but cheap way to get the look I like! Here are some pics, though we are still waiting on our new couch:

There's still the Fireplace to finish off, the couch and the curtains to make so hopefully I will be able to update with those fairly soon :D

It's really nice being able to properly sit down for meals and fun times again. As my kids get older I really appreciate all the moments I can steal with them. Now the plan is to build up our board/card game collection to store in the barrel cabinet.

 

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:

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 :)