Furnishing Your First Apartment: Big Ideas for Small Spaces
If you’re short on cabinet space, then put up wall hooks for your pots, pans, and other cooking accouterments. This makes it easy to find everything you need for dinner instead of rummaging around in the drawers and cabinets. It also gives your kitchen a real gourmet cook’s decor, which you can play up with some fancy bottles of olive oil and spices.
Situation #2: That cozy, but cute, studio fell through, and now you’re stuck squatting on your best friend’s brother’s coworker’s couch.
Solution: Depending on how long you plan to live in limbo (or if you’re sharing a one-bedroom in Manhattan, it might be a long-term living situation), you may or may not want to invest too much time and effort in decorating. Then again, you don’t want to be constantly reminded of your squatter status by the pile of clothes draped over a suitcase and boxes in the corner. Do yourself a favor and throw a funky piece of fabric over those boxes. If they’re sturdy, they can serve as a makeshift table. Stack a few plastic crates next to your bed/couch for an instant nightstand/shelf unit. Remember that futon you bought? It fits perfectly into this new set-up: couch by day and bed by night. Put a few plastic crates under the bed with extra clothes, and you’re good to go.
If the room is big enough and you’d like some privacy, buy a folding screen to partition off your sleeping area from the rest of the room. You can also reposition the screen to block any unsightly piles of clothes and other messes. But for roommates who enjoy late-night movies or Playstation in your “bedroom,” the only solution I can suggest is earplugs.
Situation #3: You’ve finally left your best friend’s brother’s coworker’s apartment, moved out of the shoebox-sized studio, and into an apartment with more than one room. Launching your own business sounded like a great idea, until that dot-com starting taking over your bedroom. Or maybe you’ve decided to use your living room as a Pilates studio.
Solution: Maintaining separate spaces are essential to maintaining your sanity. Having a mountain of invoices and half-empty coffee mugs staring you in the face will give you just as much insomnia as that cheap futon mattress. And no one wants to trip over your Pilates gear during an Oscar party.
Home workstations that fold up at the end of the day are space-efficient, but often expensive. If it’s not in your budget, then find a desk that has as much storage as possible. Ditto on the other furniture. Once you run out of floor space, it’s time to start thinking vertically. Mount some floating shelves on your wall or buy a small filing cabinet to use as a printer stand. And if you must have file folders and piles of paper out in the open, at least buy some in a funky color or pattern. Add some stacking letter-boxes to maximize surface space, and you’re in business.
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