I would love to have the discipline required to live in a place like this ’11-feet-3-inches wide, by 16-feet-2-inches deep, by 10-feet-4-inches tall’ apartment built by Steve Sauer in Seattle.

Tiny apartment

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/pacificnw/2012595209_pacificpnwl22.html

I love the effective use of space, the lack of waste, the optimisation and functionality.

I must admit I think I’d struggle to maintain order in such a place. I’m untidy and a bit of a hoarder. I can rarely dispose of anything without considering every possible, however unlikely, potential future use. Even when there’s no reason to keep a thing, I’ll probably stash it ‘just in case’.

There’s also the storage of legitimate objects with a genuine future use to consider – wine that needs aging, photographs for reflection and books that you can’t or won’t buy as an eBook. The lack of space to store such things could be frustrating – although I guess the type of people able to live comfortably (both physically and mentally) in this limited a space may not care for such things (or at least reject them more easily than I could).

Having said that, I don’t see why this ethos, to optimise the effective use of functional space, couldn’t be applied to my place of my own. After all, I’ve got other locations to store my hoard of objects with a potential future use.