Small

This picture (not my own) is of a Tumbleweed Tiny House, called Weebee.
It looks most inviting there in the glow of the sunset,
don't you think?

When I met Rick, I was living in a ground floor studio apartment next to the train. Square footage? I couldn't even begin to tell you. But it had a large, eat-in kitchen, a sleeping alcove, a walk-in closet, and a washer dryer hookup (which totally underwhelmed me at the time, but I would not -- let me assure you -- be so naive about their value ever again). It was perfect, really. And I had just gotten it painted exactly the way I wanted it. Down to the Brady Bunch-esque green striped bathroom.

Weeks later, as Rick and I worked to combine our lives, it never once occurred to us that we could actually both move into that space. Together. As a permanent solution. Someone asked about that, I recall. Maybe my mom? And we scoffed. Too small! We decried. We'd never stay married, heh heh. So we hefted all of my stuff into his overpriced, swanky, high-rise one bedroom.

We didn't stay there very long either, it turns out.

No, instead we hightailed it to Seattle. And after a variety of temporary living arrangements, we settled into, of all things, a 420 square-foot studio apartment (on Capitol Hill, if anyone is keeping track). Turns out, we loved it there. Every last inch. We even felt generous enough with the expanse of our castle to invite two cats to join us. And the four of us got along very well.

Since then, every time we move our apartments have gotten larger. Now we rattle around in a two bedroom duplex that, though still technically a small home -- it comes in somewhere at a thousand square feet -- we have little idea what on earth to do with all this space (though we're learning). And every once in a while we throw ourselves what-could-be parties (a more nostalgic version of the pity party, I guess) wherein we dream of what it would be like to live, once again, in a truly small space. Yep, we get into furniture, layouts, to murphy bed or not to murphy bed -- the whole bit.

How clever we would be with a studio now that we are small-space tested. Now that we finally know exactly how we'd like it to be.

My first little studio has since, unfortunately, burned down. But it's the space I always imagine in these hypotheticals. It would be the perfect for us, actually. With all it's kitchen. It's storage. Even a place to stash the washer and dryer we bought to fill up some of the rooms in our current house. (Four hundred square feet (ish) AND a private laundry! I squee on the inside. Sign me up!) I'd even pick tame colors for the bathroom this time.

Today though, reading up on the new small houses in the New York Times, checking out all these great Tumbleweed houses, I wonder if a rental -- no matter how magical -- could ever really fill our small-home yearnings. You know? Our little rental would, of necessity, be tucked into a cranny of some high-rise building. It would likely be undertended, but every scrap of mismatched crown and floor molding, useless hallway, and badly remodeled kitchen cabinet would be declared immutable by a landlord who just wants to keep up status quo. Our neighbors there would be young, restless, and transient. And no matter how charming the space might be despite or because of these things, it's still not a space with a patch of yard we can tame or a front door we can paint a friendly shade of orange. It wouldn't be a space we could transform into a bastion of coziness.

Because that's how it goes in California. Small rented spaces are what you live in before you've made it. They're not where you land when you're home.

I hope that won't always be true.