MOVING : Little Things Mean a Lot in Jampacked Temporary Home
The dining room table and the good china are in storage. I’m sure of that. I only suspect that’s what happened to the thermometer, our daughter’s school pictures and the recent snapshots of our new house under construction that I meant to send out with the Christmas cards.
The vacuum cleaner is stored in the garage--well, shed actually--because there’s no room for it in the 750-square-foot house we’re renting. It doesn’t have a real garage. Or a dining room.
There’s no closet in our 13-year-old daughter’s room, an add-on to this charming early 1900s cottage in Old Towne Orange. My husband often eats breakfast standing up, reading the paper at the kitchen counter because there’s not much room to spread out at the small table in the also-added-on eating area.
The three of us share one bathroom. The washer and dryer just barely fit in the space under the eaves on the back deck. I pray for balanced loads because any of that unbalanced shimmying on the washer’s part could push the dryer right off the deck.
This is life in temporary quarters where there’s only room for the essentials.
When we made the decision to sell our home and wait out in rented quarters the construction of a new one, I must have been thinking of our daughter’s math tutor. Her experience between homes meant moving with her husband to a spacious apartment in Costa Mesa that had a swimming pool and other amenities.
She, however, did not have pets.
We have a dog--a still-bounding-around-at-5-years-old Dalmatian--and an antique cat. First, try finding a place to rent for only three months rather than that yearlong lease landlords all seem to want. Then try telling them you have a dog and a cat.
That’s how we ended up at the cottage, which at first glance was rejected as shockingly small. On the plus side, it had a modern kitchen (a rental rarity in Old Towne), and a yard for the pets; it was clean and it was close to our old house--allowing us to simply roll the piano down the street when we moved. It also has lovely stained-glass windows and a kind of funky-looking ‘50s bathroom done in baby blue-and-white tile. It has a baby blue toilet and bathtub, too. Then there’s the front porch swing and wooden porch furniture painted to match the house.
“It’s cute,” said everyone who helped us move.
“It’s small,” I grumbled.
“You can take anything for three months,” they all said.
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They were right. In fact, “living temporarily” can have its advantages. It forces you to boil things down to the essentials. We don’t have any of those stacks of papers in limbo anymore. You know, those school papers and mail you aren’t quite sure what to do with. If there’s no place to stack them, you have to deal with them right away.
Is a closet an essential for a 13-year-old who spends all of her baby-sitting money on clothes? Actually, it’s not.
We ruthlessly cleaned out her old closet, doing away with 75% of its contents--those iffy clothes she would wear if only something weren’t wrong with them. We bought her a two-tiered clothes rack, and she’s doing fine. We similarly ditched some shoes, and she stores the ones she does wear on the floor under the rack. Wire bins under her bed hold other necessities.
The bathroom is pretty good-sized. We added another towel bar, a small shelf under the medicine cabinet, an over-the-door rack to hold more towels and a shower caddy for our three different kinds of shampoo. We recycled open storage units we had used in the walk-in closet in our old house and stacked them in the bathroom. We each have a bin that fits into the shelves and holds things like makeup and socks that won’t fit in the bedroom dresser.
In an attempt to lure our daughter away from the bathroom mirror, we bought an inexpensive full-length mirror and hung it in her room.
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But not all of our bright ideas worked. Take the cardboard clothing wardrobes for example. They serve as instant closets inside the house. My husband’s shirts hang in one next to the dresser in the bedroom; his sport coats are in another one in the eating area.
Putting my dresses in wardrobe boxes in the carpeted shed, however, wasn’t such a good idea. Because I work at home and mostly over the phone, I wound up qualifying for the least amount of real closet space. With my dresses in the wardrobe boxes, the thinking here went, I could dash out the back door, open the nearby shed and get what I needed handily.
As it turned out, I never dashed out there to get anything but the vacuum cleaner and the Christmas wrapping paper. And, while I wasn’t looking last weekend, rainwater seeped into the shed through a crack in the slab, the carpet wicked it over to the bottom of the cardboard wardrobes and the dresses soaked it all up. Everything reeked of soggy cardboard and carpet (with a hint of wet dog thrown in).
Oddly, I was not all that upset by this development. My husband lugged the wardrobes outside while I calmly hung wet, smelly dresses on every possible perch throughout the house. I took them to the cleaners when they dried and came to the conclusion that I really don’t need all those clothes. At least not for now. They went into another cardboard wardrobe but this one is at the rain-tight (so far!) storage space with the rest of our worldly goods.
This relatively calm reaction is surprising from someone who not too long ago stood in the blue-and-white tiled bathroom and shrieked, “Why are we all three standing in here at the same time?!!”
“You’re in my space,” I frequently complained when we first moved here. As a family, we tend to vent our emotions. I told everyone we’d probably kill each other living in close quarters. Actually, we don’t argue anymore in what we have come to call “the little house” than we did in our old house. We cooperate more. We share things like the computer and the hair dryer and, perhaps most significantly, bathroom time.
We have winnowed our possessions down to what we consider the essentials: the computer and printer, piano, sofa, one end table, one armchair, a cocktail table in the process of being refinished, TV and VCR (sans entertainment center), china cabinet being used as a desk and file storage center, two dressers (one makeshift), a twin bed, a queen-size water bed and a small kitchen table with three aging bridge table chairs.
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Despite the small space, our lifestyle hasn’t changed that much. With a living room that seats four comfortably, we weren’t expected to host holiday dinners with our relatives. But we’ve entertained friends, and our daughter has had friends spend the night.
We even had a Christmas tree. That was the easiest tree we ever picked out. We strolled onto the lot, asked for the skinniest tree they had, took it home and trimmed it some more to make it fit the allotted space. I lobbied for putting a tree on the front porch and gazing at it out the window, but nobody else liked that idea.
In addition to the basic furniture, we’ve hung a few things on the walls and kept out little reminders that this is home--like my favorite white china teapot. And the plants help. The tall potted ones are bunched together for lack of space and lend a kind of jungle atmosphere to the place. A small sweetheart ivy plant in a lattice-textured pot rescued from the back porch makes the eating-area table more cheerful.
Although we’ve decorated after a fashion, the total look would have to be called U-Haul Chic. We’ve got those brown boxes stashed everywhere: under the table in the eating area, behind the sofa, on top of the bookcase. What’s odd is that these boxes were supposed to contain things we might not be able to do without, but I don’t think we’ve rustled through any of them.
If I haven’t used whatever is in them in three months, do I really need it? More frightening yet is the thought of all those other boxes in storage. I know I’m going to have to go through them eventually.
After three months, I have learned to turn sideways to navigate our bedroom without banging into the corner of the water bed. I think my husband has finally learned to duck to avoid hitting his head on the bathroom door frame. It must be home.
It’s good that I’ve come to terms with living in a smaller space: The rain has delayed things at the new house, and we are going to be here longer than the three months we first thought.
Which underscores an important point about temporary arrangements--they sometimes are lengthier than first figured. It is also why no matter how temporary things seem, it’s worthwhile to make where you live into your home.
