explore, express, experiment

the garage on Woodland Ave


My home in Bowling Green is small, even tiny (if you don’t count my storage spaces). The official living space is 320 sq feet, with three distinct areas:

  1. There’s a sleeping area, dominated by my bed. This area also holds a large cupboard with my scholarly work, and a lovely antique desk that holds my art supplies (that’s the intention at least).  There’s another interesting desk — I think it is some kind of library furniture — that holds my paperwork. And  a cupboard that holds some of my clothes.
  2. There’s a sitting area, with a comfy chair and side table, a cupboard for technology, and a second clothing/jewelry cupboard. Both doors to the outside world enter into this area.
  3. Between these two areas is my round table, which serves as a desk when I’m working and as an eating table when I’m … eating!
  4. Off the sitting area is the kitchen/bathroom, a single space separated by cabinets, a self-contained kitchenette unit, and a curtain. The bathroom section holds a toilet, a shower, and a very tiny sink.

That’s my living space. I have windows on three sides of the space, good heating and air conditioning, and plenty of display space for my art. I love it.

Outside my front door, I have a small deck with a rocker and a little table, plus a big plastic deck box to store cushions and candles and lamps and such. This overlooks a very large yard where I have a fire ring, a hammock on a stand, and a small table with chairs. Enough for four. This is my primary space for hospitality.

Outside my other door is the garage space, which I share with my neighbors/friends/landlords. I have about 120 sq feet of that. I use my space for storage, including a full-size refrigerator, a rack for hanging clothes, and quite a few set of shelves for storage. I’m trying to get rid of everything there that I don’t use, but having stable storage space does not motivate that kind of smallification. I need to figure out how to increase the pressure on that activity. Maybe conceiving of it as a studio/project/shop space would help.

I also am paying for two storage units (100 sq ft total) because I have some furniture that is waiting for transport to my daughter’s home in Maine (will be accomplished in a month!) and a bunch of other things (dishes, books books books) that I couldn’t say goodbye to when I moved out of my “real” house almost two years ago. Now I think I can do that.

Finally, I have a campus office, where a lot of professional material is stored, including most of my physical books. That’s about 100 sq ft, I think. But if I were not being a professor, I don’t know how much of that space I would actually need. Some art display, some book storage, but a lot of it would no longer pertain to my life if I weren’t professoring.

So all told, I am using about 640 sq ft of space in Bowling Green. All of it is my “lab” for living small. Tabulating it here is a first step in documenting this experimentation.


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