bestkungfu weblog

Last year, we sold our house and moved into an apartment closer in while we looked for a condo. In the deal, we lost about half our square footage, which was all well and good, except for the massive space crunch that ensued. Ever since the move, we’ve been struggling to create a home where we each can be doing something in our own space without disturbing the other.

The first wave of this transition was to dump what we didn’t need. We disposed of desks, chairs, wine racks, untold quantities of clothing and media. That helped, but by no means were we out of the woods. Every month or two, we come back to shaving down the contents of our house.

Wave two was storage. We rented 25 square feet of space and filled that with the items that we need to keep, but don’t have to access regularly. Still, the space crunch continued to loom large.

We are now in wave three: optimization. Knowing full well that we can’t continue to add stuff and its associated visual clutter, and also that we can’t go the way of the minimalist or the ascetic, we’re working on ways we can keep the things we use regularly close at hand, and hide everything else. When we moved in, the space next to our television became a server rack, with two desktops, two printers, two LCDs, and more cables than you can shake a stick at. It takes up space, but worse than that, it creates visual noise and makes the place look like a geek lives in it. (duh.) My next major project is to pull out all of that gear and arrange it in the second bedroom, away from the living area, but still within reach both physically and via VNC.
Another problem area was the TV itself. Televisions are troublesome things when you’re working on interior design. They’re tethered to power and input sources, and tend to cause furniture to be oriented around them, which reduces face-to-face interaction and makes space management tricky. In the very near future, I expect to be able to hide away nearly all the components of our media center, but the next best thing is to have them out of the center of the room. We replaced our old TV with a front projector (the Optoma EP719, specifically), which we will mount on the wall above the couch, and move the stereo components just to the left. The space we gain back toward the front of the room is staggering. And more importantly, this will orient the living room to be less about TV and more about living.

All of my CDs are in two large footlockers in the spare bedroom. Their value to me at this point is merely archival, since they’re all ripped to MP3. I thought that maybe I’d move them to storage, but instead, I’m turning them into furniture. I’ll just flip them on their side, put some padding on the end, and slap a sheet of wood on top. The door-desk ethic in action. This will be where I make my studio, which has been so hard to set up and tear down that it just hasn’t been worthwhile to create new content these days. It will also be somewhere I can sit down and work without owning the entire living room.
I’m thinking about a few other changes down the road. I just read that the long-promised Ultrawideband Wireless USB adapters will be coming this spring, and that will give me the ability to move my iPod dock anywhere I choose, and still keep it synced. I’ll be able to put the printers wherever I want, too. New technology rules.

We’re just two people. We should have no trouble living in 900 square feet. But we don’t need to compromise our lifestyle in order to do it. I plan to have a space with an unobtrusive media center, a podcasting studio, and a relaxing living area by the middle of February.

Which, of course, is when we’ll be shopping in earnest for the new place.

Sigh.