What ?

What exactly is our living situation?

Well, it's crowded. When all three of us are here at the same time, it can get tight. When my parents come to visit, two adults have to be sitting at all times. Only two people can stand and/or walk at once. This is when the elementary school lessons of "walking in a straight line" come in handy. Our two year old daughter, unaware of those lessons, jets around us and inbetween legs to reach her desired destinations. And when she's riding on her tricycle, everybody LookOut!

Here's a very rough sketch that I made quickly with paint.net We are totally blessed with what we have:

This is the kitchen/dining/office from the corner by the TV. On the left (outside the photo) is the entry door. You can see the door to the bathroom on the right (left of fridge). We have a full-size range/oven, a full-size sink, and a regular-size dishwasher. The fridge is full-size as well.

The main inconvenience is the lack of counter space. Anything on the table is within toddler-reach. If I need the table for rolling out pie crust or something like that, I do it during my daughter's bath time. Haha. If you look closely, you can see my laptop on the table and our daughter watching home videos on it.

I stood in the same spot by the TV, turned to my right, and took this photo of the bedroom. These pictures were taken last December, soon after we moved in. At the time, my daughter was sleeping on this sleeper sofa, but she outgrew it. We moved a twin bed in and put it right next to our queen sized bed. Now the curtains separate the rooms inbetween our daughter's bed and this sleeper-loveseat-couch thing.

This is our closet. Seriously. I also have two long dresses that I hang in the laundry room. My daughter and I share the tall chest of drawers and my husband and I share the other chest of drawers. Our shoes are piled onto the white wire racks inbetween. You can sort of see the window above the shoes and the A/C unit in the window. The closet shelf is great because it has storage space above it.

One lesson I've learned: Waste No Space.

This is the dining/office area, taken from the bathroom door. The room had few lights, but large windows, so we use a lot of lamps at night. The diaper bag is kept on the back of the front door.

This is the living room, taken from the kitchen. You can kinda see the chest of drawers that I use for storage-- linens, tools, office stuff, kitchen stuff. Anything I don't have room for gets put in that chest of drawers on the left. The unit on the far right holds more office stuff and anything we don't want our toddler getting into. I had some storage bins and put them to use on top of the unit on the right and also on top of the fridge.

The photos of the bathroom didn't turn out well. The main thing in the bathroom is that every available wall space is hung with shelves. And we are highly selective about what "things" we keep in our house. With space being at a premium, it is easy to weed out (put into storage or throw away) the stuff we don't use/don't like/ don't need. I suppose that's Lesson #2.