My fears about studio living

Don't get me wrong. I am JAZZED about moving into my little studio.
But I have some worries.
So I'm making a list. *

1. I am not a neat person. My husband is. This has already caused several sessions of energetic discussions in our marriage. In an apartment with no doors, I'm afraid my messiness will get out of control. The flip side is, this might cause me to be neater...

2. We currently have a dishwasher. We are moving to an apartment with no dishwasher. I'm the type of person who can (and has) leave dishes sitting in the sink for a week. I'm also not as through a dishwasher as my engineering husband.

3. Storage. I like stuff. I have a lot of tchotchkies and stuffed animals and photos. I want to make our apartment feel grown up and pretty and not like a college dorm. I'm just not sure how to achieve that.


Mainly, I'm worried about the neatness and the stuff. I mean, we are definitely getting  rid of a ton of furniture before we move, and I'm excited about using the porch as a second living area** but I'm worried about containing my "ness" without making it feel like I'm cleaning all the time.

Susannah do you have any older and wiser thoughts? :)

Susannah here! Since we both love lists, let me move through the thoughts numerically.  But I'm not any older or wiser!  Just been squished in a smaller space for a teensy bit longer.

1.  For the record, I have the same problem! My husband is kiiiiind of a neat freak.  And by kind of, I mean he can't sit down and relax until the apartment is reasonably picked up.  Which drives me crazy because then he can't relax with me on my time table.  In my mind, the cleaning could happen later. Or tomorrow. Or any other time than relaxing time.

(As a small side note, I have a few personal areas of neat-freak-ness.  I have to have a clean bathroom. Must have. It's weird, I know.)

The short (hah) version is the smaller apartment has helped me figure out the areas where I need personal work, areas I can happily take care of, and areas where it's just better if I don't do that.  I have learned -- it was hard at first -- that sometimes Matthew needs to pick up around the apartment for 10 minutes before sitting down for a movie or to hang out with me. edit: Anthony's the same way.  And he has learned that he's just always going to have to help me change the sheets because I hate doing it.  At the same time, he knows the bathroom will always be clean...buuuttt I won't guarantee those dishes won't sit there for a few days until I feel good and ready to wash them.  As for the rest of it...we're working on it. And it's a good learning experience for us. 


2.  If he cares so much about the dishes, why not trade something?  For example, what if you promise -- and you'll have to follow through -- to always clean out the drain or do the laundry or keep a room picked up if he'll almost always take care of the dishes?  If that's not a good way for you, then...maybe it's helpful to know that I find dishes much more enjoyable late at night.  I can think and listen to the tv in the background and it gives me something to do while Matthew works in the evenings. That was our first thought too...to have it be a trade. We fear we'll just end up resenting each other if one of us always does a certain chore. But hey! We're working on it too :)


3.  Shelves and walls!  Since studios are so tiny, your best unexplored storage space is on your walls!  We put in shelves above the couch.  I already had some next to the bed.  I use the space on top of my "kitchen" cabinets to store things like canned food and foil.  The space on top of my free-standing shelves is my "display space" for my "stuffs."  If that's not enough space for your things, then I'll let you in on a secret my mother once told me: if you rotate all the little things, they seem like new every time and you don't get tired of them.  You could store some of it, display some of it, and rotate some of the things in a few months or a year or so. 


You can do this!  Another cleaning tip I've heard that helps me sometimes: set a timer for 10 minutes and clean with the fury of one of those superwives that always seems to have a clean house, a well-fed husband, and loud-and-happy children.  Just 10 minutes. Then go relax.  Later in the evening, clean or pick up for 10 more minutes. Shorter increments make picking up easier to handle.  Or, if a Gilmore Girls marathon is on and you simply can't tear yourself away, clean during commercials! 


Hope my silly-person ideas are helpful!

*Since we're going to be spending a lot of time together you should know: I LOVE lists. And office supplies. They make me happy.
**Obviously, this will work best in the summer time, but I'm hopeful that I can find a fall/winter solution as well.

on flooring

In our tiny apartment, we knew we had at least one top priority that didn't involve the closet: the floors. The floor is mostly hardwood, for which I have a reusable fake-swiffer thing.  The reusable pad is awesome and I use it pretty often.

This meant that the only thing I couldn't clean easily was the large area rug and the smaller rug in the kitchen.  This may not sound like a big deal to you.  However, between those two rugs, that's over half of the apartment that I was cleaning with a lint roller and a sub-par handvac.  I'm not kidding.  A lint roller. On my hands and knees with a lint roller.

But this week was a momentous occasion!  We bought our first vacuum cleaner!

The rugs are happy. The husband is happy.  I'm ecstatic.

Dirty rugs are now a thing of the past!

I highly recommend investing in a vacuum cleaner.  Seriously.  It has already saved us two cleaning meltdown-arguments and we've had it for less than a week. 

xoxo Susannah

Downsizing

So. A little over a year ago, I moved to my husband's town where he's getting his PHD.
We chose an adorable loft in a not adorable part of a town. I moved in.
And then....
The mice invaded (we've killed at LEAST 14)
I left a soul sucking job
We got married and he moved in (read: awesome fun, but more expensive then you'd like)
Our utility bills were getting way out of control.

So. When our lease was coming up, we decided we needed to move. And decided that a rent we could afford on one salary in a part of town we actually liked was more important then a pretty apartment that we could just barely afford.
So on Monday, we sign a lease for a studio.
Granted, it's bigger then Sussanah's (yay) but it's still quite a bit smaller then our current 1.5 bathroom loft.
So while Susu is settling into a newlywed tiny studio life.....
I'm figuring out how to parse down our belonging's to a studio and how we're going to store away all of our stuff once we get there.
An adventure...it is a brewing folks.
:)

reality sets in

You're married! Congratulations! You're embarking on a new adventure with someone you love.

And then...

Reality.

Questions you may be asking yourself:
Where the heck is all our stuff going to go in this teeny tiny apartment?!
Where did all this stuff come from?!
How many pairs of shoes does my wife really need?
Does my husband really need all those dress shirts?

I understand.

You see, my husband and I were just married a couple of weeks ago (yay!) and he moved into my teeny-tiny-itty-bitty apartment.  I mean, we're talking maybe 300 square feet.  It's about the size of a large dorm room. Oy.

The purpose of this blog is to explore the life adventures that come along with being newlyweds living together in a living space that forces you to be up close and personal with each other.  And along the way, hopefully we'll learn some things about marriage and friendship and this new phase of life.

More posts, info on who we are, and many adventures to come!