A ROOM UN-OCCUPIED IS WASTED AIR

                                    Unoccupied-Room

Thinking just about living space, most houses have way too much. Remember, living space is usually only 10% occupied by what is in the room—the rest is air.
Since one person can only be in one room at a time—and often people aren’t home at all, or are gathered in one room—at any given point, most rooms in American houses are empty. That is a giant waste of space and money.

It can be solved through a number of means including:
 increasing the multi-purposefulness of spaces
 increasing the adaptability of space
 decreasing the number of things you need your living space to serve as
 decreasing the amount of simultaneous and different rooms you need to be in

Our living room doubled as our bedroom when we moved our son’s nursery into the closet. I designed it with the intent of keeping the perception of 10% density when you were sitting on the couch while avoiding reducing our floor space by the area of the bed.

I attempted a few tricks in order to have it pass the wife-threshold. (That magic bar that every home improvement project must clear in order to have any chance at survival.)
The bookshelves behind the head double as the space underneath our headboard shelf. It gives you something to look at when you walk in the room other than a bed, and kept the pillows from falling off.
I also minimized the number of support beams on the front and sides—you can see there is nothing coming off the leg closest to you. That reduced the feeling of clutter and decreased that chance of head-bonking.

I also built stairs that doubled as a bookshelf and since they had no
backing, they let in a lot of light. The fact that they were stairs was critical as I built this when my wife was six months pregnant. She was able to get up there until the day before our second son was born.
The second method I mentioned above was adaptability. It is one I didn’t have a chance to experiment with, but I love these examples.

 Moving apartment walls
 Origami apartment

The idea is that your house changes shape to adapt to the current need. For example, a wall moves back and forth between a bedroom & living room so they are both larger when used without increasing the total space used.
I would have loved to have the loft bed on an adjustable riser system. The height it was at was sub-optimal for both living & sleeping. But that would have made the build much more complex and wasn’t in the cards for this period of life.

The final two ways to reduce living space involve reducing—the hardest step for most people, but easiest to get gains from.
The simpler your goals for a house, the easier it is to have a small house that provides them. Our living room didn’t need to serve as a TV room since we didn’t have a TV. That meant our furniture
arrangement didn’t have to take into account seating positioning, cable inputs, or speaker placement.

Finally there is the factor of number of rooms occupied. This is the one that ultimately got us. As our family increased to four people, it became impossible for every person to be in a unique room. That posed significant challenges during nap time, bed time, and when having company over. We could have made it a bit longer, but thisis the item that would have gotten us.


Real Style --------Today