Redecorating a tiny home requires sacrificing brilliant design ideas for practical ideas that fit your space. For example, if you’re in love with design pieces like this infinity bookcase, you’ll probably have to settle for a bookshelf that fits under the stairs.
In the process of making your tiny home your own, life lessons – like sacrifice – are inevitable. It doesn’t matter how old or young you are, redecorating a tiny home provides life lessons you probably won’t get anywhere else.
1. How to budget in three dimensions
If you were redecorating a standard home, you’d select cost-appropriate design elements that match your monetary budget. When redecorating a tiny home, you’re on a budget of space. Perhaps money, too, but space comes first. Regardless of how much money you can spend on new décor, if it doesn’t meet your space requirements, it won’t work. In that regard, you may not be able to buy the expensive décor even when you can afford it.
Whether you’re just moving into a tiny home or redecorating to create a fresh vibe, you have to be a Tetris master. You’ve got to have the vision to make efficient use vertical space, and find ways to make furniture double as storage. Practicality will always trump aesthetics, and you’ll need to find creative ways to make practical look good.
Society places a heavy focus on finances in every area of life, as if money is the most important aspect of everything we do. When you redecorate a tiny home, your context changes. Suddenly, space and functionality matter more than money – sometimes to the point where you source materials and furniture from garage sales and Goodwill because nothing new meets your criteria.
2. Being a minimalist reduces stress
Many people don’t understand why anyone would give up their possessions and live in a cave for the rest of their life. That’s a little extreme for many, but when you redecorate a tiny home, you’ll understand.
You don’t realize how much stress you’re under while living in a standard home because it’s normal to you. Once you downsize, your life will get simpler. You’ll have less yard work to do, your electricity bills will go down, you won’t use so many dishes carelessly, and you’ll start to conserve resources like water. Not because there’s a shortage, but when your life becomes easier, you won’t have to take extra showers you’d normally take after exerting all that activity you once did.
It’s not that having less stuff makes you happy. It’s that having less to manage and maintain puts you in a space of peace and appreciation.
3. What’s really necessary
It’s easy to think of desires as necessities. For example, many college students consider coffee a necessity. Others consider having a laptop a necessity. Necessities depend on context. If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need a laptop as much as you need food. If you just want to survive, food and water are your basic necessities.
Redecorating a tiny home will help you see the ever-changing nature of necessities. Perhaps when you were living in a 3,000 square foot home, your couch had to match your recliner. In a tiny home, you may realize you don’t even need a recliner, and it’s not important for your furniture to match.
You’ll also discover how much of your past you feel like hauling around. Sure, you could get a storage unit, but do you really want to pay $200/month to store your past? If it’s not important enough to keep in your home, why hold onto it at all?
4. Trying something new
Trying new things is a lesson many people resist. When you redecorate a tiny home, trying new things is the only way you’ll ever get anything done. There’s no way around this lesson.
For example, have you ever thought about making an elevator bed? Many people who build tiny homes realize an elevator bed is the perfect way to make use of vertical space. When the bed is raised up, the couch or living area is accessible below.
Something simple like cutting a hole in your kitchen countertop to drop food scraps into a compost bucket will seem like a brilliant idea.
Embrace the unexpected lessons of redecorating your tiny home
Life presents lessons to all of us. If we’re paying attention, those lessons will be useful to us and shareable with others. Many of those lessons come in ways you least expect, like through the process of redecorating a tiny home.
Article Submitted By Community Writer
