1. How big?
~1100 sq. ft., 3 bedroom 2 bath

2. 5 in our family: Kids are 6,4 and 2

3. What are the rooming arrangements?
Mom and Dad are in a loft bed (my writing space is underneath), the three kids share the smallest room with their dressers and the master bedroom is the playroom (don’t you wish every playroom had a toilet right there?).

4. If you could add just 150 sq. ft. of space to your house, what would you use it for?

An arctic entryway (we live in Alaska)and window seats. {grin} These are the someday-changes that are on our list already; I sort of haven’t indulged in dreaming beyond the feasible.

Maybe an extra room for bookcases and/or a schoolroom.

5. To what extent (if any) does the size of your home impact your decision about whether or not to have more children?

It was after DH (dear husband) was sure he was *done* at three that I began to shift my thinking and felt our lifestyle could cleanly support 3 kids indefinitely (DH wants to stay in the house “forever” and we drive 5-passenger cars).

Really, having a small house helped me identify my (co?)calling as a writer, since I had reached a sort of living balance with my own three and had wondered if I should have another baby, or take on fosters. Without the (obvious) room I was able to shift my thinking from anxious “should I” to “here I am.”

6. What are some creative things you’ve done to fit everyone in and make it work?

My biggest tip may not be that creative or useful, but it’s made all the difference for us: start with the right house layout.

With the livingroom/Dining area/kitchen all one big room with only the island counter for division, I have a place in the house that actually feels “big” to me. I can push stuff to the walls and play race-and-slide or “run around the island” with the kids.

Also, beginning with 3 bedrooms was perfect, because we’ve done the math and know how we’ll juggle everybody till they’re gone, and we can do it without “moving up” which is important to my husband.

~I love the loft bed in my room, and
~we use the computer in the livingroom for all t.v. and movie watching, along with playing music/radio/all audio, so we don’t have to support an extra screen/speakers or electronics (DH got nice speakers for the computer, so those didn’t have to be doubled either). We also
~have lots of shelves, especially in the otherwise unusable nooks and by inner walls.
~We have a crawl space under our house and hardly have had to throw away anything yet. When the kids can’t keep their playroom clean I bag/box the least-used (or least cleaned-up) stuff and put it there to cut the clutter without losing a (felt) investment.
~The children have two low long dressers; one is under the window and the other supports two short bookcases (that support my habit).

Under the house is where I keep books that the kids are too young to properly appreciate yet.

Sometimes after a few months I trade out the toys (or a couple books) and it’s like Christmas and I’m the best mom in the world.

Practically, the thing I like best about my “little house” is that (if I play worst-mom-in-the-world) I can actually get the whole house cleaned in one day.

And it scares me, at the end of those occasional days, to imagine what it would be like to maintain that huge house I admired last year when I wasn’t thinking of it full of children and my own stuff.

Our rooming arrangements: Baby with me in the bedroom, three older kids in the other bedroom. They have a bunkbed; officially the oldest is to sleep on top and the younger two to share the bottom, but I let them rearrange themselves, as long as #3 girl doesn’t end up on top (since she still has night accidents sometimes). #1 girl hates to sleep alone, so if she can’t talk #2 boy into coming up with her, they’ll probably end up all three on the bottom like they did last night. They probably wouldn’t survive if I tried to put them in separate rooms at this age.

With an extra 150 sq ft, I would so make a dining room. We can’t even pretend to fit around a table in our little kitchen, so we put down a vinyl flooring over a section of the carpet in the living room and have a 6-person dining table on that. It makes our main room cramped. (Although a second bathroom is also high on my wish-list.)

I assume I will end up with many kids, but I’m also trusting that God will provide us with a bigger place in a few years. The smallness of our apartment was much less of a consideration for me in deciding when to have #4 than the fact that I wanted to bf #3 until she was at least 2 years old, and didn’t want to be pregnant and bfing at the same time. As for whether #5 will come while we are still in this apartment or not… that is probably going to be up to God, too.

Tips: Large drawers that roll out from underneath the kids’ bunkbed (in lieu of dressers) are wonderful. As much vertical storage as possible is wonderful. Decluttering would help, if I actually got around to doing it sometime. Not buying stuff helps. If I buy a large package of paper towels or toilet paper, I often leave them in the van until the day I have to actually open it up.

2. 5 of us, plus 1 dog & 1 cat (cat lives outside though). My husband, myself, 2.5 yr old boys, and 1 yr old daughter.

3. My husband and I have a room/office/craft room, twins share a room, and daughter has a room which we also use as a guest room when guests are here (then she sleeps in the twins room).

4. If we had 150sq ft of extra space, I think it would be a home office or craft room.

5. If we were able to have more, living here would impact that greatly. Seeing as how it's about 208sq ft per person right now, adding a 6th would bring it to about 173.33. And we already don't even have room for a crib in our daughters room let alone a second.

6. KEEP ORGANIZED. Ha. Floor to ceiling shelves helped, under the bed storage, over the door hooks, outside storage shed, but mainly everyone helping keep things in order has been how we have gotten use to it, and even comfortable with it.

At one point, my wife and I yielded the master bedroom to our three older sons, all three of whom could comfortably sleep there without bunk beds. We then moved into one of the smaller bedrooms. We wound up moving back because third-eldest-son still wanted to sleep in our room and youngest-daughter never left our room (and still hasn’t at age two). So my wife and I are back in the master bedroom. The two eldest each has his own room, and third-eldest, fourth-eldest and new-baby (born Feb. 13, 2009) all share the master bedroom with us. We have a queen bed with a full-size bed pushed up against it. My wife, baby and fourth-eldest occupy the full-size. Third-eldest and I are in the queen, but he has his own bed in eldest’s room and has begun sleeping there of late.

I want to add space by building a two-story addition in the backyard. My wife wants to move to a bigger house. However, the challenge is this: most houses in our price range still have just three or four bedrooms, possibly with a game room that might be do-able as a bedroom. Our current house actually provides most of what these larger houses would provide except that the bedrooms are much smaller and therefore have less room for clutter. If we built the addition in the backyard, we would probably still have less than 2500 square feet, but we could easily add two to four additional (but smaller) rooms.

My wife’s severe pregnancy migraines are what keeps us back from having more children, though we have five, one newborn, so “keeping us back” is, perhaps a misnomer. Though I expect it won’t be in the future. These are nasty, debilitating, lose-half-your-day-in-bed migraines. That she has born five children in six pregnancies (including a miscarriage which I attribute to the stresses of evacuating from Hurricane Rita) demonstrates both the validity of Genesis 3 and the fact that my wife is a saint.

Every once in a while we go on a severe de-cluttering of the entire house. After our newborn came, I painted the two bedrooms of my eldest children, ruthlessly clearing out stuff that had cluttered up their closets. Some (like a filing cabinet) went into the garage. Lots of other stuff went in the trash or (like an old laser printer) are marked for recycling. Those rooms look huge now compared to their previous arrangements.

2.There are nine of us!

3.We have mom, dad, and baby in one room. Grandma has her own room, and the five kids are sharing for now.

4.We are actually adding on right now, so defiantly bedrooms! We are adding on 500 sq feet which will include two bedrooms a bath and a small office area for books and homeschooling supplies.

5.You know when we first moved into this situation I did worry about it a lot. But once we get the addition done that will be two kids per room. So the idea doesn’t really bother me as much. Plus kids grow up and move out, so I don’t think it would be too bad a situation if God blessed us with more kids.

6.Having five kids in one room now for over six months has been a nightmare! The laundry is so bad it is crazy. So I am not sure I can give any advice. We have tried everything to get them to keep it under control but it seems impossible. They only have two dressers and once closet, so it is chaos. One thing that we have learned is that the kids all need some quiet time. It is really necessary, especially for the older kids.

1) Our house is 1200 sq ft, 3 SMALL bdrms (10×10 or so) & 2 EVEN SMALLER (like, 1 person can sort of fit comfortably) bathrooms

2) 3 (soon to be 4) – mom, dad, 2.5 yr old, baby on the way

3) DS & baby will be sharing one bedroom, with a twin bed & a crib in it. Hope to get a "real" dresser soon, which means removing the closet doors to fit the dresser in hopes of keeping a little floor space for books & some small toys. The 3rd bdrm currently has a guest bed, but by end of summer we're getting rid of it & just using that space as "over flow" for baby things as well as storage for my scrapbooking things.

4) Definitely a bigger dining area – we just have a kitchen "nook" that 4 can sit at comfortably, but we pretty much don't have people over unless it's summertime & we can all sit on the HUGE back patio we have – I would also take away some sq ftg from the family room & add it to the bedrooms or the bathrooms.

4) In some ways, yes, in other ways, no. I think I'll have a better perspective once I see how a 2nd child fits fine here – it's also been inspiring to read all of the other situations in this post!!

5) As it's already been shared, the toys are at a minimum. I bought a medium sized rolling bin for the living room & an even smaller on for the family room. If the smaller, "loose" toys don't fit in those at the end of the day, they get donated. The larger items like trucks & balls get put on a converted TV cart with shelves that I have in the family room. Currently the only other toys in the house are a bin of stuffed animals underneath the baby's crib. But it will be a different story once baby is here & HIS toys come back out from storage…

We also have a rather sizeable covered patio that I'm envisioning using as "useable" sq ftg someday. I'd like to put an enclosed cabinet with shelves out there so I can someday store art supplies & outdoor toys.

Also, I completely agree with another commenter about how books take up more space than children!! I would LOVE some built-in bookshelves for that very reason…