The comments and questions began immediately after we announced to friends and family that we were expecting baby #3: “So I guess you’ll have to get a bigger house now, huh?” or “Ooooh, I guess you’ll be moving soon.” But actually, we LOVE our home and we are choosing to stay in our tiny house with 3 kids.
Crazy, right??
I never realized how cultural our housing choices are until we lived in South Sudan. We rented out our 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom, Craftsman Bungalow when we moved to the mission field, and then moved back into it when we came back to the States. And truthfully, after living in a blistering hot, constantly-full-of-dirt, grass-roof mud hut with all kinds of critters and creepy crawlies…our little bungalow felt like a luxurious mansion!
Oh how perspective is everything!
No one questioned our decision to stay in our house when we only had Clark, and once everyone found out that Elliot was a boy, we had a lot of people agree that they could share their bedroom.
But once they learned that we were having a girl, we had a lot of people ask us about moving into a bigger house. And they’re always taken aback when we tell them that we actually have no plans to move for at least a few more years.
So today, I totally want to encourage you. Not only can it be done, but it even comes with some genuine benefits!
Here’s why we are staying in our tiny house with 3 kids(at least for now).
No. 1 | Family Togetherness
Living in a small home fosters family togetherness.
I am not opposed to each individual in our family having their own space so we can each have some alone time. I think that’s good and necessary, so we are already intentional about carving out time and space for each other to be alone when needed. And thankfully, our house has a nearly full-size basement that we’ve slowly been finishing. We currently have our home office, a play room, laundry room, and storage downstairs. That gives us some options for spreading out and playing or working when we need to.
However, we also really feel like living in a small home fosters family togetherness and quality time, encourages us to grow personally as we learn to share space and be respectful of each other’s needs, and allows us to stay plugged into each other’s lives. This will especially be important as the kids get older. We probably won’t always live in this tiny house, but we also never want to live in a house so big that every person can just disappear into their own space and completely disengage from family life.
But I will readily admit that only having 1 bathroom is probably the hardest part of small house living, and will only get harder as more and more people in our family are potty trained! 😉
No. 2 | Affordability
Our house is incredibly affordable and gives us financial flexibility.
We feel pretty strongly that as followers of Christ, we are meant to live below our means. That looks different for everyone, of course, but for us it means staying right where we are.
We bought our house in 2007, just prior to the Great Housing Bubble Popping. It was an incredibly affordable home at the time, especially in our area where property values have always been on the higher side compared to surrounding counties. And in those 12 years, the has market tanked and then rebounded again. Property values in our county are high and getting higher as more and more people seek to settle down here.
Staying put means we’ve been able to build equity, and thanks to our fixed-rate mortgage, our payments have stayed low even while property values have risen quite a bit. While our budget still has wiggle room, buying a bigger home would mean stretching our budget to the max. And honestly, it would make it much harder for me to stay home full-time and homeschool.
In this current season of life, tiny house living enables us to more freely follow where we feel the Lord is leading our family.
The other HUGE bonus of tiny house living is low utility costs. Y’all, even last winter during our sub-zero degree weather, our gas bill never went above $150. And I keep it at least 72 degrees in the house! Not having a panic attack over our utility bills is a massive blessing that honestly makes me question why we’d want to upsize our house. 😉
The truth is, we could have made different choices, and plenty of families do make different choices than us. And that’s totally okay! Since we all have different jobs within the Body of Christ, other families will be called to make different sacrifices.
We love that we aren’t slaves to our mortgage, that our utility costs are low, and that we have the financial flexibility to invest in other ways!
No. 3 | Benefits of Room Sharing
It’s a cultural belief that every child needs their own bedroom, but there are actually a lot of benefits of sibling room sharing.
In America, we tend to hold to the belief that every child needs his or her own bedroom. And truthfully, that’s a fairly modern idea in our country, and it’s certainly not how a lot of the world lives. These two articles give a fascinating account of the history of individual bedrooms and the benefits of sibling room sharing.
There’s value in children sharing a room. Our boys LOVE sharing a room (in fact, after we moved Elliot to a big boy bed, they slept in the same bed until we built their bunk beds). They talk and giggle for a little bit before falling asleep, and they have even comforted each other in the night when one of them is scared.
It’s not without challenges. Some nights they wake each other up, and occasionally they fight over toys or Clark will demand to be left alone for some quiet time. And some mornings, the early riser will wake the other one, and they’re up earlier than I’m sure they would be on their own. However, we definitely feel like it’s good for them to learn to share space, and because they’re together all day and night, they’re thick as thieves.
It will probably come with some extra challenges when we move Nora’s crib into their bedroom, too. But we have a full year before that happens, so we have some time to make adjustments and prepare them for that. And thankfully, even though our house is small, the rooms are pretty spacious. They aren’t enormous, but the boys’ bedroom has a lot of open floor space (we gave them the bigger bedroom) and will easily be able to accommodate all three kiddos while they’re little. (Again, it helps that they have a playroom in the basement, too, so their bedroom isn’t full of toys.)
No. 4 | Minimal Stuff
Because we literally don’t have the space for #allthethings, we aren’t slaves to our stuff.
Americans love stuff. We’re a nation of people who have so much stuff that our basements, garages, and attics are full of things we probably haven’t seen in years. And we still buy more stuff!
Blaise and I are totally not immune to accumulating stuff (and I’m going to throw Blaise under the bus here and mention that he’s a total pack rat, which we really have to keep in check), and we have a fair amount of stuff stored in our basement and garage. But living in a tiny house with 3 kids means we don’t have loads of extra storage, so we have to carefully choose what we keep and how we store it.
Once upon a time, we lived in a 300 square foot camper. Then we lived in a 500 square foot mud hut. So a 986 square foot house is huge! Okay, not huge, but we totally know that we can live with less stuff. And we also know how freeing it can be to shed stuff when we accumulate too much of it.
Truthfully, I’d rather have the space to host more people than to store more things. So that’s something we keep in mind as we talk and dream about our someday house.
No. 5 | Community
Over the past 12 years, we’ve built up community here, and that’s worth its weight in gold.
We love our neighbors! We have a really great neighborhood and we live next door to, across the street from, and a few blocks away from people who have become rich community for us. It’s not that we won’t have good neighbors whenever we move, but we have the kind of community right now where I can show up on my neighbor’s doorstep crying, and she’ll invite me in, set me on the couch, and hug me while I share.
You don’t find that everywhere, and it’s a really big deal to keep it.
To us, staying in a place where we have this kind of community is incredibly important. Whenever we do get to a point where we start seriously house shopping, our neighbors, distance from church, and nearness to friends will be among our top considerations as far as location goes.
It’s that important.
It’s not forever.
The fact is, we won’t live in this tiny house forever, especially now that we have 3 kids. We know that the time is coming when we physically outgrow our space, and that’s okay. We also feel that because we have a girl now, we have a time limit for how long the three of them can share a room.
Eventually we’ll buy a bigger house – with TWO bathrooms (that’s a big one on my checklist). But honestly, we’ll probably always have the boys share a bedroom just because we believe the benefits outweigh the challenges. And we don’t have dreams of upsizing our house significantly. It’s land that we want. We’d quite frankly take our house, add a bedroom and a bathroom, move it to a few acres, and be perfectly content (that’s a conversation for another blog post)!
But our decision to stay in our tiny house with 3 kids is an intentional one.
What about you, do your kids room share? Why or why not? I would seriously love to hear from you on this one!
