About this app

It's not about suffering with less. Building small homes is about achieving your objectives rather than seeing what you can eliminate. Thoughtful preparations, research, and good design will yield the results you want.

As with any objective, you must determine just what it is that you want. What's important to you and what isn't? Drill down to your priorities first.

The easy way out would be to simply take a house plan you like and shrink the dimensions and cut out rooms. Easy perhaps, but it makes for a dysfunctional home. What you want is to make certain that living areas aren't cramped and that the things you really want aren't eliminated.

Two tips often given when designing for a smaller home, center around this very idea. They both involve expanding rather than shrinking but one focuses on the element of combining while the other involves sharing. Let's look at both:

Let the kitchen absorb your Dining Room or dining area.
Create one single shared large bathroom with a separate toilet room.
In the first idea, you create a big kitchen that is combined with a dining area. The result is a larger area used for different but complimentary functions. It's a great example of how to combine areas and reduce the number of rooms.

The second example is all about expanding the size of a room (the bathroom) but designing it to be shared more easily. By separating the toilet (and perhaps the sinks and/or shower) you can eliminate one bathroom and make the remaining one very functional and even luxurious if that's what you want.

The bottom line is to think "bigger" without adding square footage to the home. Bigger rooms create the feeling of space and comfort, not crowded and small. Think about what you can share or what you can combine.

App Permissions

Allows applications to open network sockets.
Allows applications to access information about networks.