My house is really small and quite awkwardly shaped. Downstairs is only about 60 square meters and upstairs I basically just have my bedroom as it’s not very practical space due to the low ceiling.
The obvious choice here would be to just have the couch on one wall and TV on the opposing one but that just feels like a waste of space for a house this small. The two doorways also heavily limit where I can place furniture. However the room is also not large enough to be turned into two rooms so I figured a semi-open partition like this could be a viable compromise and it would then also allow me to create a little office space for myself which I currently lack entirely.
The only other option I can come up with is to block the left doorway and move it to my kitchen instead (the right doorway leads there) so then I could move the TV set onto that wall and put the sofa where my desk is here.
I guess I’m just looking for any thoughts or suggestions. I don’t feel like I have much of an “artistic eye” so I find it quite difficult to figure out a coherent interior decoration. The building part is my speciality, not so much the design.
This picture is based on a SketchUp model that I did so it’s to scale and based mostly on existing furniture.
Lol… I had a flat with 3 separate rooms on 65 meters…
Kitchen/living room in one with a bedroom and extra storage closet on 55sqm here
Living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, mudroom. That’s 5 in my case.
“My house is really small”
Has 60 m2 and a bedroom upstairs.
It’s an objectively true statement. My job entails going into people’s homes and of the roughly 120 different houses that I’ve been to over the past 3 years I can only think of one that’s roughly the same size as mine. My customers have summer cottages larger than my house.
Where’s the kitchen?
Scroll down.
Downstairs is only about 60 square meters
Come on, this picture shows 25 or so. Unless your couch is 5m long…
I assume that OP miswrote and meant that the total area, including the top floor is 60 m². Judging from the width of the stairs, I would guess that it’s about 5 meters wide, a little longer along the other end.
Living room is only 18 square meters. I never measured the total floor area myself. I just know there’s about 60 square meters of space with enough height to stand straight and about 90 if you count the parts with low ceiling as well. May very well be that downstairs is closer to 50. That’s not really the point here, however.
My last house was 40sqm on the bottom storey and it had heaps more space than that image, upstairs had 2 bedrooms a landing and a bathroom. At a guess I’d say your image was max 30sqm, maybe the 60sqm was for the whole place?
When I bought the house the total living area was said to be 60sqm and the total floor area is 90sqm. I guess my downstairs is roughly 45 - 50sqm and the rest comes from the middle section of the upstairs where there’s a “standing height” which is 180cm but I’m 185cm tall myself, so…
Here’s the rest of the downstairs excluding bathroom I’ve yet to model. That empty room is mudroom. Bathroom is in that missing corner.
I would turn the shelf-partition part at least somehow in a different way, so that your back is not turned towards the mudroom when working. Now it has a kind of unnerving vibe to it.
Do you work from home often? If not, your laptop is taking up a lot of space. I used to live in a small house, 60sqm total for 4 people. Spaces need to be multifunctional, rather than zoned. I’d try and get rid of the partition.
If you work from home often it’s quite a small boxy space to work in, even with an open partition.
Not really. I’m a self-employed handyman. I’ve just always had a dedicated computer desk but now I don’t so I’m doing all the business related paperwork on the kitchen table and the rest of the time I sit on my living room floor with mouse and keyboard on the desk and using my TV as a computer monitor. It works but is quite unergonomic.
It’s not that I absolutely need an office space. Here I’m just trying to figure out a usecase for the few spare square meters I have to play with.
I think hitmyspot is right here- that’s a long narrow corridor doing not much for you. Is it necessary to have a full partition where the TV is? If you can have the partition be somehow impermanent (roll-up or to the side maybe), you’d gain more visible space making it feel more open and getting real use out of the window that’s hidden in the corridor.
I have a relatively small house, not a tiny-house, but ~100 sq meters and I took down a non-structural wall to a room adjacent to the dining room (entry room of the house) and made the kitchen ‘wall’ a bar so you could see through to the kitchen from the dining room (that one is structural so there’s a good header above it). The place feels so much bigger than it actually is after that.
I currently have a solid wall about the length of that partition but located roughly where the stairs are. The sofa is under the window where that office is now and the TV set is against that wall I set up. My intention was to make a walk-in closet of some sort into that spare space but it didn’t end up working out how I imagined it.
In this new version I intentionally didn’t make a solid wall but a half wall instead with open shelving on the top to let light shine through. It’s true that the “corridor” there doesn’t serve much purpose due to how narrow it is but I’m possibly planning on blocking that left doorway at some point so then I can fit something into that corner of the room as well.
Something that plays a factor here as well is that I don’t want people seeing my display when I’m on my computer so that too limits my options. Additional benefit of that half-open partition is that it lets me directly communicate from my “office” to the living room if by some miracle a day comes that I no longer live here alone.
My current living-room section of my living room is even smaller than the space in this new design and it still works. I have only a 48" TV so the optimal viewing distance is around 2.5 meters I believe.
Holy crap that’s what sketchip is? That is cool. You sound like you understand design better than me, so whatever feels right to you will probably be what you want. All I can offer is:
Go with your gut!
This is the sketchup model. That “artistic version” is made with AI.
should’ve just posted this one instead of the slop version
for next time:
Is the half wall on which you’ve placed the tv optional? If so, I would place the couch opposite to where it’s at, in front of the window. The office nook in front of the other window. And the TV where the couch is right now. More distance between your couch and tv for reduced eye strain. Better use of the windows. You doll should be able to see outside when you’re working or studying. And better flow in the room.
Very cool, thanks. I watch videos about building tiny homes and imagine this would make it much easier when I want to build one myself.
I use it a ton. Virtually every time I transfer the mental design into an actual 3D model I discover all kinds of impossible design choices or just otherwise foolish decisions that I otherwise would’ve only realized once I’m actually fitting the parts together. Especially with small spaces I have a tendency to vastly overestimate how much space I’ve actually got to work with.
It’s also great to have a plan with all the measurements already laid out. You can pre-cut everything and when put together the final dimensions often end up scary close to what they were meant to be which is almost never the case when you’re just winging it.
I also don’t have a good artistic eye, but what I notice here is that your office becomes a corridor and the partition can limit the light coming from the left window. Would it be conceivable to flip the position of couch and partition? Downside is that the office would be less separated.
The shelving on the partition is open on both sides so that it lets light shine through. I currently do have a wall partitioning the room in a similar way but it’s approximately where the stairs are and the sofa is on the opposing wall. My intention was to build a small walk-in closet there but I over-estimated the space I had in my disposal so it didn’t end up working out.
