A Truly Tiny Apartment

Living in 105 square feet

By Leah Etling on Aug 22, 2012 in News, People | 3 Comments

Take an average sized apartment  and reduce it by 90 percent. Could you live there?

With all the buzz in the news lately about micro-sized apartment living – particularly in markets like New York and San Francisco, where space is limited and renters will pay top dollar for even a closet-sized space to call home – we wanted to get the inside scoop. Literally, what is it really like to live in a teeny, tiny, itsy bitsy apartment? Is it sustainable? Does it drive you crazy?

So we found Genevieve Shuler, who calls herself the Small Space Savant, to get our questions answered. For the last eight years, she’s called a 105 square foot “studio” in New York’s Greenwich Village her home sweet, albeit very small, home. Genevieve is a regular gal who like most of us owns a few extra pairs of shoes and loves her cat. She’s managed to make her micro living situation work with a few creative adaptations, like washing her dishes in the shower.

Read on to find out more about how she functions in her pint-sized apartment. It’s inspiring insight for simplifying your life. She’s become a creative organization expert, even helping her friends and strangers create solutions for their own small spaces.

 TBS: What adaptations have you made to your life to make life in such a small space viable?

GS: The biggest adaptation I’ve made in my life to make my small space work, is doing my dishes in the shower! I don’t have a kitchen sink, and my bathroom sink is too small to be practical for washing dishes, so my mother came up with the idea for me to do them in the shower. I have a corner shower caddy rack with those triangle baskets, and that serves as my dish drying rack. After I cook, I rinse the dishes and put them in the bathtub, and then in the morning I wash them while I’m in the shower. I *completely* get that this is, to put it mildly, unconventional… but the bottom line was that I wanted to be able to cook in my apartment, and the by-product of cooking is dishes, and so this was the most practical solution. I’m not suggesting it for others, but for me, my small space, and my situation? It works!

TBS: What are three things you couldn’t give up, even with such a tiny apartment?

GS: My cat, Ruby, first of all! I also refused to give up the ability to cook, even though I don’t have a proper “kitchen,” and I wanted to be able to still have lots of shoes and bags. I used to have over 60 pairs of shoes in the space at one point, but I’m probably down to about 30 now… and I have a ton of bags that are stored in wicker baskets up high. As for the “kitchen,” I chose to allocate space to house my cooking supplies, so that I can still cook in the apartment. I have a hot plate, toaster oven, and microwave, along with a mini food processor and rice cooker. I can only cook one thing at a time, so the entire process takes longer, but I’m able to do it!

TBS: Are you an advocate/evangelist for other people living in tiny spaces? What do you tell them about why it can work? 

GS: I’m an “advocate” as much as I can be! I love being able to tell people about my apartment, because it is so far from the ‘norm,’ even here in NYC where apartments are much smaller than the rest of the country. I tell people that once you live in a small space, you do realize how manageable it is, and how you really don’t “need” more space. One of the other benefits of having a small space, is that it curbs consumerism. You don’t have room to bring things home, so you don’t shop as much for things that aren’t essentials. What you do shop for, are ‘solution pieces,’ and items to make your space more efficient.

Something that has served me *very* well in dealing with my space, is that when I am shopping for a solution piece, I really consider items in a store based on how they *could* be used, even if it is not for their intended purpose. For example, I wanted to have a rug in my apartment, but it was impractical because I couldn’t vacuum it, because where would I store a vacuum? At IKEA one day I spotted some white bath mats that had rubber on the underside (and they weren’t high pile, which would equate to a scratching temptation for my cat), and I realized that using three of those could stand in as a rug, and each week I take them to the laundromat & wash them, so they stay clean!

TBS: How many hours a day, on average, do you spend away from your apartment?

GS: Monday – Friday I have a standard 8:30-5:30 job, and in the evenings it’s a mix between being out with friends, sitting on the stoop, and being in the apartment. On weekends, it’s probably an even split between being in the apartment and out of it.

TBS: Do you think you’ll live in such a small space forever? If not, what would an “upgrade” look like?

GS: I won’t live in a space this small forever [though I could have hardly imagined I’d have been here this long when I rented the space, close to 8 years ago!] but I do like the idea of smaller living spaces. I watch a lot of shows on HGTV where people are upgrading and constantly talking about needing more space & “lots of storage space,” and living small has really taught me how little I really do need – there’s a very big difference between what we “need” and what we “want.” For me, an upgrade would involve six things: a stove, an oven, a full-size fridge, a kitchen sink, a closet, and not having to climb a ladder to get into bed every night!

 Many thanks to Genevieve for answering our questions!