How Large Families Make Small Houses Work For Them

If you have a big family, it can sometimes be challenging to fit everything into your home. Two kids are difficult enough to manage, but once you get up to three or four, you rapidly run out of space. Children just create a lot of mess – there’s no getting around that fact.

Most parents can’t afford a six-bedroom mansion, so you need to figure out ways to use your space creatively. Raising a large family in a small home is possible, but you can’t fly by convention. Often you have to pluck ideas out of the void that complements your current accommodation. Working with the flow is almost always better than trying to go against it.

Families have to make do with smaller accommodation for a host of reasons. Downsizing is one possible reason. Having too little equity to move to somewhere bigger is another. Whatever the case, you don’t need to fantasise about moving continually. There are ways that you can make use of your existing space and get what you need from your property. It might not be ideal, but it’s better than your current arrangements.

Create A Plan For The Clothes

Kids’ clothing is smaller than the adult variety, but it still takes up a lot of space. The main issue is the need to change it every year. In the first ten years of life, children double in size four times. Clothes don’t fit for long on growing children.

Start by creating a recycling plan for all your kids’ clothes. Once the first-born grows out of them, place them in the attic until the next child grows large enough to wear them. Then rotate the process, looking after the items as best you can in the interim.

Where possible, have a policy of operating two dressers per child or bedroom. Having more than one allows you to specialise each for holding particular apparel. One could house socks and underwear, and another t-shirts and shorts. You could also separate on gender lines, with boys’ clothes in one and girls’ in the other – ideal if you have two of each.

Declutter Your Storage Space Regularly

Most people have enough storage space in their homes, even if they have a large family. But they fail to declutter it regularly enough, so they wind up not being able to use all of it – a big problem. Oh, and to be fair, clutter usually isn’t just “stuff,” it’s also the never-ending mess that builds up when life is busy, and everyone’s living on top of each other. But ideally, you may want to consider looking into domestic cleaning services since they can actually be a really practical support. And no, not because anyone’s failing, but because keeping a small home under control with a big family is genuinely a lot. Even having someone come in occasionally can stop the mess from turning into that constant background stress.

Most of the time, your biggest enemy is just old stuff you no longer need. Next time you go rummaging through your closets, cupboards and chests of drawers, ask yourself whether you’re actually using all the stuff you have. Be rigorous with yourself. If you haven’t used something for more than a year, there’s a good chance you won’t need it in the future. It’s just taking up space for no reason.

Every month, go through your storage areas and throw out the things that you don’t need. If you’re keen on recycling, you can give your possessions to charity shops or sell them on eBay. Don’t allow clutter to spill out over the floor.

Use Your Rooms In Non-Traditional Ways

Large families tend to run into trouble when they insist on using rooms in the traditional way. Parents often think that they are the ones who need the master bedroom. But they often have fewer possessions than their children. Kids have to make do with what are mostly cupboard rooms, while parents take space that they don’t need.

There’s now a trend, therefore, towards parents handing over the master bedroom to their kids and using spare bedrooms as storage areas. You don’t even have to move to a different so-called bedroom, as defined by the architectural plans. Some parents move into the dining room – an area of the home rarely used in most busy families.

Thinking out of the box can help in other areas too. Utility rooms, for instance, can become play areas. And you can even give up on the idea of a living room, especially if everyone spends most of their time socialising in the kitchen.

Add Space At The Rear Of Your Home

Architects of the past didn’t really appreciate how much people would wind up using their kitchens in the future. Thus, they designed them as a place where the woman or servants would prepare food, and nothing more.

Today, though, that’s no longer how it works. The kitchen has become a sort of gathering place for the whole family, especially at breakfast time.

Adding space at the rear of your home can help to increase its functionality tremendously. Companies like Bi Fold Doors UK provide examples of the sort of extensions available. Essentially, you’re building your home out backwards and sideways. Most people build on top of their existing patio and then just relay slabs once they finish changing the footprint of their home.

Adding space in your kitchen helps to free up space in other communal rooms. You could, for instance, add more storage furniture elsewhere in the home if you make your extension large enough.

Upgrade Your Bathroom

Ideally, you want at least two bathrooms in a household with two or more children. Coping with less than that is a significant logistical challenge. You wind up with long queues outside in the mornings, and there’s never enough time for everyone to get in and out before work.

Even so, upgrading your bathrooms can help, especially when it comes to organising all your bathroom items. Six people sharing a single lavatory is a recipe for mess and clutter. Multiple toothbrushes, towels, makeup, and toiletries can get out of control fast.

In these circumstances, you need to think of your bathroom more like a mechanic’s garage where everything has its rightful place.

If you don’t have a vanity with drawers in your bathroom yet, invest in one. Make sure that it has multiple storage areas for the various objects people use while they bathe. Have a drawer for towels and washcloths. Use another for makeup. Toothbrushes should be in a medicine cabinet, preferably in a holder of some description. And if you have young children, you can keep a separate drawer with nappies, talc and whatever else you need.

You don’t want wet towels going back in the drawer where they will go mouldy, so towel storage is essential. Hooks are okay, but heated wall radiators are generally the best solution. If you need extra storage space, you can always just use command hooks.

Go Vertical In The Bedrooms

There’s a reason the army is obsessed with bunk beds – it allows them to use all the space at their disposal, both laterally and vertically. If you have a large family, you need to think with the same kind of military precision.

The bedrooms are ground zero in the battle against mess. So you need to consider the entire volume of your kids’ bedrooms, not just the floor space. Most rooms offer far more storage options that most owners are prepared to admit.

Kids don’t always want to sleep in the same room as each other, but most families manage it okay, especially if they start from an early age. As they get older, they’ll require new arrangements. But, until then, there shouldn’t be any problems.

If you have very young children under a year of age, they can sleep in the same room as you, again freeing up additional space in the rest of the home.

Make Use Of Outdoor Chests

Outdoor chests used to be something you only saw in schools, but the idea is so successful, that’s it’s not come to the family home too. These are primarily outdoor lockups you place in your garden to provide additional storage for all your possessions. They’re either standalone or fit under your decking.

Most are just big metal boxes, secured with a padlock. Inside families store all sorts of things, from deck chairs to bicycles. If you live in a small house, you can get creative in what you use it for. Most are waterproof and keep out the vermin, so you could potentially use them for delicates, like clothes, in an emergency.

The great thing about lockups and outdoor chests is that you can just add more if you have space. Professionals will usually lower them into place with a crane or transport them on a trolley to your designated part of the garden. Planners don’t consider them to be a permanent structure, so they don’t require you to get planning permission.

Living in a small house with a lot of people can drive you nuts after a while, but with the right approach, you can make things more manageable. Even if you deploy all of the strategies introduced here, there will still be times when things seem out of control. There are no perfect solutions when it comes to this sort of thing. But at least staying where you are right now will save you a lot of money compared to moving. And that can only be a good thing.