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Large family, small house ideas!



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amother
OP


 

Post Tue, Dec 28 2021, 7:38 pm
-If you have multiple kids sharing a room, how many dressers do you have?
-If you don't have a playroom, where do you keep: building toys, board games, art supplies?
-How do you handle having only 1 three seater couch with a family of many more than that (especially on Shabbos)?
-Where do you keep towels if you want to use your linen closet to store other items?
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amother
Lilac


 

Post Tue, Dec 28 2021, 8:13 pm
Linen - I have plastic drawers in one bedroom closet.
Towels - high shelf in a bedroom closet.
Dressers - 2 kids to a dresser
Toys - I bH have large walk in closet off my living room. - I didn’t I’d say to build a storage unit/shelves to store vertically.
Couch - we crash on dining room chairs. I have a fireplace off dining room. I’m looking to put a large cusion with pillows there for more seating.
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dankbar




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 28 2021, 8:21 pm
In linen closet I only keep linens & large towels.

Dish towels I keep next to dishes in kitchen cabinets.
Kitchen tablecloths for every day & shabbos is in a drawer in the kitchen facing the dinnete.
Tablecloths & challah covers are in dining room in bottom of china closet.
Every child has their own bath towel or bathrobe hanging on hook in bathroom & gets washed once a week.
Sheet for porta crib & baby fuzzy blankets is in my room where porta crib is.
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#BestBubby




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 28 2021, 8:26 pm
Buying a large closet/wardrobe has more storage space then a dresser.

You can put a full length mirror on a wall or door instead of using dresser mirror.

A large storage closet for toys and games.

Get a bigger couch or a second couch.

I LOOOOOVE couches and everyone should be able to sit.

Need a linen closet?

Buy a storage closet - the answer to all questions.
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amother
Peony


 

Post Tue, Dec 28 2021, 8:42 pm
Your specific answer will depend on the layout and space of your home. You have a limited space, so prioritize what's important.

One thing I did- I packed away a lot of seforim that weren't being used much and used the bottom shelves of the living room bookshelves for toys/lego/art supplies. (I love books so this was hard for me.) Those shelves have doors so when it's all packed away, it looks neat.

Big toys are in bins under the beds in the bedrooms. Also, personal bins for personal chatchkes are under the beds. I also have a bookshelf in each bedroom with kids books and card/board games.

No linen closet. Sheets are in a shelf in my bedroom closet. Bath towels are on a shelf in the bathroom. Kitchen towels in a cupboard near the kitchen.

Couch- chairs or arguments. It is what it is. Enough couch seating is nice but not a necessity.

The place is cluttered. For good things.
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amother
Tulip


 

Post Tue, Dec 28 2021, 8:46 pm
I don't see or remember each point, but I'll join in with what I recall-
Kitchen towels and weekdays tablecloth etc are in kitchen cabinet near pots/large mixer.
Linen closet ( small) has linen etc plus bath towels, but very tight in there.
We stagger dressers to make it fit. Maybe not ideal, but for now it's ok. Recently got a bunk bed to fit more in the room. May be getting another soon possibly iyh.
Shabbos anything like tablecloth, glasses, napkins- anything really, is in the breakfront- anywhere we find the space. But there are two drawers and two lower doors that come in handy.
But my house is super cluttered and would love to love to be inclined to get rid of stuff so we have more space, or at least more organized.

Eta- definitely not enough seating by couch, but can't do much about it. I'm contemplating rearranging and getting a cushy bench cuz doesn't take up much space. We'll see...
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Scotty




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 28 2021, 11:52 pm
I found dressers less useful. I have a highboy (tall & narrow set of drawers) in each closet. One room we customized closet ourselves snd put in multiple rods and shelves. Pinterest is packed with ideas for maximizing closet room. I don’t have any furniture except beds in the bedroom.

It’s HARD not to have a playroom. The homes we didn’t have one still give me bad memories!
We keep our board games in this huge coffee table I have in living room:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d.....title

We Splurged on it for $300 during a quarantine and it was worth every penny, we use it for storage, for doing homework, for playing games on shabbos, and pulled up to the couch as my workstation during the day. Best purchase ever. It holds tons. (We keep board games sideways in it so you can reach in easily and pull out games.)

Art supplies are kept in an ikea Billy bookcase (in plastic boxes) in the garage. Doesn’t sound like that would be helpful to you though, sorry. In smaller apartments I have kept supplies in the kitchen (where we do our projects anyway.) markers are in the pantry and paper is on top of the fridge (don’t judge me) and I keep a cutlery holder style inbox thing from Marshall’s on my kitchen table with scissors, pens, and pencils etc. that is our junk drawer (my kitchen has only one drawer which I use for fleishig cutlery.) You may also want to consider raising beds on risers (around $10 for a set of four) so that you can slide plastic boxes of building toys underneath the beds. Children can play in their bedrooms this way too, as long as you keep on top of the cleanup!

Couches are super important to me. I got two sofas (separately not a set, not matching but not clashing either) from a free chat in my area. Together with the coffee table that is my living room. It’s a very small room but everyone’s most favorite room of the house (after the kitchen) because of those couches! This is where family memories are made… I would get rid of literally anything else that would prevent me from putting in a second couch.

In apartments where I have lived I’ve stored towels beneath the sink in bathrooms. If you have a laundry room you can also consider keeping a basket of towels there too. It’s hard because towels take up so much room!m

Also, and I don’t know you at all so don’t take this as judgment, I got rid of EVERYTHING. I mean EVERYTHING. It is a lifesaver. The book Organizing From The Inside Out changed my life and taught me how to do it!
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Scotty




 
 
    
 

Post Tue, Dec 28 2021, 11:56 pm
Duplicate post sorry
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amother
SandyBrown


 

Post Wed, Dec 29 2021, 7:24 am
You have to be creative about storage. We have nine-foot ceilings with molding about a foot down, so we put shelves up near the ceiling for storing things like out of season clothes and suitcases. Of course our kids sleep in bunk beds, and under the bunk beds is a collection of lidded printer paper cartons to store everything you an think of. Twelve such cartons fit under each bed. I covered them with wood-grain Contact so they blend in with the wood bed and the wood floor and more or less disappeared.

We bought furniture that was as tall as possible. We bought armoires and hanging closets with optional cabinets that stack on top. The stack reaches about eight feet high, which leaves another foot from there to the ceiling, useful for storing items too long or wide to fit in the cabinets.

We put extra shelves in our built-in closets and packed them right up to the ceiling. Since the original shelves were only about half the depth of the closet, we added a second board to make each shelf twice as deep. It's like a game of 3-D Tetris any time we need to retrieve anything, especially because the closet doors are only about half the width of the closets and reach only about 18 inches below the ceiling. My spatial reasoning IQ surely skyrocketed as a result.

Every closet door has storage on it, a purchased set of vinyl-covered wire shelves, or a shoe bag, or a similar homemade item, or a rack to hang an ironing board or a ladder or something. Every bedroom door has something on it, too, usually a shoe bag. Every shelf is either solidly packed with boxes or has one of those little wire baskets suspended from it to fill in the wasted space below it. Bedroom closet doors have hooks on the outside to hang outfits being prepared for an event or items that aren't quite dry enough to out away. We even have a few nails or hooks inside the closets to hang things like belts, bags, and umbrellas.

Short items like skirts, shirts, pants and jackets are all hung together on one side of the closet, long items like dresses and robes on the other, so the space below the short item can be used for more storage. Mostly we use copier paper cartons but we also have some plastic drawer units. Our kids each have a desk, but since nobody ever uses the desks for anything but storage, each desk has either a carton or a small plastic drawer unit in the kneehole. Rolls of gift wrap, lulav holders and other long, narrow items hide out in the back corners of the closets. Things in active use like hockey sticks, baseball bats and other sports equipment go in a tall plastic basket-like job that I think was sold as a hamper.

I cut down copier paper boxes to a shallower height to store small, flat items. I also collect sturdy shoe boxes of all sizes, infant through Paul Bunyan, to store everything. Boxes help me maximize storage because they stack well and don't waste any space. You can't stack anything on an iron, but put that iron in a lidded box and you can stack something else on top of it without having it all come crashing down. I also put handles on the end of boxes to make them easier to slide out of a stack. A handle can be made of duct tape,rope, heavy braided cord salvaged from a fancy shopping bag, or an actual plastic handle salvaged from some other box like the ones laptop computers or toys come in.

You also have to be ruthless about not having too many possessions. I do laundry every day because we don't have a lot of clothing. I wash linens every week, sometime putting them right back on the bed when dry. We don't have room for a freezer, so I can't cook ahead in any great quantity or majorly stock up on perishables on sale. I've learned not to accept freebies just because they're free.

We also dejunk. All. the. time. If I buy a new T-shirt or the kids get a new plaything, we get rid of an old one to make room for the new. But usually the process is reversed: I get rid of things first. Most of what I buy these days is to replace things that were broken, lost, outgrown, or used up. If something no longer serves a purpose in our house, we try to find it a good home. If we can't, it goes out anyway.I can't afford to live in a storage bunker. The recycling bin is my friend.

Purging is painful but necessary. Nobody but Hashem has infinite space, and even He compressed Himself to make room for Creation. You know a king of Israel is not supposed to amass many horses and gold and silver. I think there's a lesson here for the rest of us as well. If the king is not to accumulate too many possessions, surely the rank and file should also be modest in their acquisitions.
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