Anyone have 3 kids in a small house?

adri77 · October 2010

And sorry, not just pg with #3, but you actually have 3 little beings right now......and by small house, I mean ours is a little over 1500 sq feet.

We put our house on the market 4 months ago and it hasn't sold yet. We were hoping it would have sold by now, and our plan was to build, and be in a new house this spring. We want to start TTC #3 this spring, and wanted to be settled into our house first. But now reality is sinking in, and we don't have our hopes up to sell before spring, but are thinking about TTC#3 in the spring, regardless (I will be 34 this June, Ds2 will already be 2.5, I don't want to be much older, and don't want them all to be too far apart.) I already feel like we are on top of eachother (especially on weekends when DH is home, and especially in the WINTERS!!! UGH!) Just wondering how bad it will be if we aren't able to sell, and end up having 3 kiddos in this home.....what are your tips for not going crazy if this is the way things play out for us???? BTW, if we aren't able to move....I really am not super upset about it b/c I feel like we are so blessed to have our adorable little townhouse, our healthy, happy boys, will be THRILLED if we are lucky enough to add another bambino to our mix, etc......I don't want this post to come across the wrong way!

JOEBunny · October 2010

I don't, but it is pretty common around here. Most of the houses were built between 1920 and 1950, so they are smaller. If they haven't been added onto like my house, they are less than 1400 ft. Several of my friends have 3 kids in houses like this. They just get rid of everything they don't absolutely need. The kids have fewer toys & clothes, but they don't seem to care. It saves them money too. A few have storage units for the stuff they won't need in between kids, but more of them make use of mom to mom sales to get rid of and buy stuff as needed, instead of keeping things they are not currently using.

It can be done. My first house was 1100 squ ft and the person I bought it from raised 4 kids in it!

KrisBriMcBunny · October 2010

I'm doing it now....just under 1200sq ft. The 3 girls have their own room but we dont have a separate family room so its kinda hard for the older girls to have a bit of privacy when they have friends over. Thats the only downfall.

firefightersgal · October 2010

JOEBunny:
It can be done. My first house was 1100 squ ft and the person I bought it from raised 4 kids in it!

This. My house is a little under 1500 sq. ft. and the original owners (my great gparents) raised six kids here!

lona.hunn@gmail.com · October 2010

IMO 1500 sqft is not that small. At one point I had 4 children, 2 adults, and 5 animals in my 1200 sqft house.

Keep toys and clutter to a minimum. Buy closet organizers, use under the beds for storage, get rid of clothes that don't fit and toys that aren't used immediately. It's really all about declutter and organization. It can be done.

AnneUCSB · October 2010

My house is 1000 square feet and I have three kids. We have 3 bedrooms and 1.5 baths so the older boys share the largest bedroom, DH and I have a small bedroom, and the baby has the other bedroom. We have a smallish living room (no family room). We did convert our one-car garage into a playroom for the boys so that has HUGELY helped. We were able to put all there toys out there and we put a TV and DVD player out there so that when they want to watch a movie or play, they don't have to take over the living area of our house. Plus it helps when the baby is asleep that the older boys are out in the garage/playroom (it muffles their constant arguing!).

As much as I would love a bigger house, the area we live in is RIDICULOUSLY expensive. Our little 1000 sq ft home is worth almost one million dollars so anything bigger in our same neighborhood would be over one million and we just can't afford that right now. We make it work!

4Speedy · October 2010

I grew up as one of three kids in a 1100 sq ft house. I now have a 3000 sq ft house for 2 kids. In a lot of ways, I think the smaller house was better. Now, we all have our seperate spaces. DH and I can each do our own thing in our seperate spaces and go an entire day without seeing each other until dinner. Growing up in a smaller house, my sister and I shared a bedroom until she left for college and all 5 of us shared one bathroom. We had one phone, on the wall in the kitchen and we had 2 tv's. One was in the family room and the other was in my parents bedroom. So the majority of the time, we all watched one tv and had to take turns. It was a privledge to be allowed to watch Disney while laying on my parents bed on Sunday evenings because my dad was watching football on the other tv. we had a very roughly finished basment with our playroom. It was not the cute decorated playroom you see all over The Nest. It had cinderblock walls and linoleum tile flooring. My mom put down a large rag rug to "warm" it up. We had a huge work table for art projects, 3 student desks for playing school, dolls/cribs in the corner and a metal rack for all our board games. we played down there for hours and loved it. The upside of having a small house is that we were motivated to play outside from morning till night, yearround. We all got a long because we HAD to get along in such a small space. We learned how to respect each other and how to negotiate.

There are a lot of life skills I learned in a small house that I don't see my children getting right now and I will have to figure out other ways to teach them. I have a lot of great memories of living in a smaller house, in a lot of ways, I miss it.

lsufan · October 2010

We live in a 1500 sqft townhouse with no outside space. No yard, no deck, no basement, and no garage. It works for us right now, but it can be a pain sometimes. There is no place to keep strollers or bikes except in the car or in our entryway. Our bedroom is big, but the boys have tiny bedrooms. My older two have shared a bedroom for the past year, and my youngest sleeps in the crib in his own room. We are short on closet space, but if I were better about going through our clothes and getting rid of stuff it wouldn't be so bad.

I would not wait to have another child just because of the space issue. I mean, I wouldn't have 10 kids in this house, but we're doing fine with 3.

Dcubed · October 2010

You will make it work. We are in a 2 bdrm apt that is maybe 900 sq ft. DS and DD1 share a bdrm and the baby is sleeping in a co sleeper in our room (but ends up in our bed at her middle of the night feeding). We sold our house in June and moved here while waiting to find our house and now waiting for it to be built. We didn't wait for the third for the same reasons you said (our age and didn't want the kids too far apart) though we knew we were going to be selling our house or living in an apt with the 3 kids at some point and time. We have it set up to accomodate toys and clothes but we don't have a backyard to tell the kids to go outside and run off energy by themselves. On the weekends we just try to come up with outings to be out of the apt. I have come up with more ways to use space (under the beds, hooks on the walls, baskets, etc to help organize the clutter). Could I live like this for years - no we would have to get at least a 3 bdrm larger space but I know this is only temperary for us.

Carol*Brady · October 2010

We just moved last summer from a 1000SF (plus a full finished basement) house & we had 3 kids in it for a year. I was 33 when I had DD#3. My 3 girls shared 1 small room. We had a bunk bed w/ trundle (for clothes), smallish closet, crib (w/ storage drawer), bookshelf & dresser/changing table in there. Our bedroom was fairly small & our LR/DR were average. Our kitchen was fairly small & had no eat-in area. It was a 85yr old craftsman bungalow in the city--lots of people raised 3+ kids in these houses at one time. You don't have to have a lot of crap. We had a finished basement but the only room we really used down there was a 13x15 playroom/family room. The rest of the rooms (bathroom, guestroom, large laundry, small office) we could have easily lived without. You can do it...especially the first couple years. We did move to a larger home this summer due to an opportunity that came up--but it's 2300SF & we don't use a couple of the rooms still at all--We have another 1100 SF finished basement (full apartment) that we rent out until I go back to work.

adri77 · October 2010

Ok, thanks, Ladies! Soooo glad to hear no one saying how bad it sucks!!!! And lots of you are in smaller homes....I think I feel my home is small b/c of the layout- the kitchen is eat-in and HUGE for a townhouse (at every showing, this is the feed back we get) but the living room is tiny,the upstairs hallway is very spacious (WHY????) the bedrooms are TINY- DS1 can only fit his bed and a small dresser. But DS2's closet is big so we could actually put a dresser in it to make room for them to share a room....see, I'm making it work already, ha ha ha!!! We will give it a go and make it work like everyone else does! Thanks again!

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