small apartment living room ideas with kids

hi i'm jen from momcave. i live new york city one bedroom apartment with my husband, our four year old, and until recently two cats. and we have anotheron the way. (baby, not cat) my family all lives in the suburbs or thecountry. and they are always asking me, "how do you fit everything and a kid in a one bedroom apartment?" "how does that work?" over the years i havecome up with a lot of a little systems to fit as much time as possiblein this apartment. in fact my husband calls this apartment"the submarine" because he says it's like a submarine. everything has to have it's ownplace. so i'm going show you what we do.

so growing up in the suburbs, there was always acloset that was the cleaning closet with your cleaning supplies, your mop, your broom, your vacuum. all of that stuff. we don't have that. but what we do have is this secret compartment on the kitchen door. it blends in. but when you open it, you can see this iswhere we keep all of our stuff. our cleaning supplies, our duct tape our light bulbs, our jewelry cleaner. so this is we have this in here. string in her. we have everything in here. i dread the idea of a kitchen without a dishwasher. but you can't just install one if you are a renter.

and there isn't always space. we bought a portable dishwasher and we have it on furniture sliders. we slid it under this part of the counter, right here. where there wasn't anything. and when it's time to do the dishes... it's not hooked up to the water or anything right now. we pull it out. like so. and slide it over to the sink and hook it up. there's a hose in the back of it. you pull it out. you hook it to the sink. you plug in the dishwasher. and that's how you wash your dishes.

so this is how you do it. there's like a button right here that you push with your four fingers. for extra storage, they put a cabinet on top of the refrigerator. there it is. and we even store a lot of things on top ofour cabinets. and there's a little special slot for this ladder my mom uses. oh yeah, we keep our step stool in a little slot between the refrigerator and the cabinet. because we don't have a lot of extradrawers to store them, we keep our knives on a magnetic strip thingy here on the wall. which toddlers can't reach.

we used to have an office area set up in the bedroom. but once the bedroom also became a nursery there wasn't any room. and we needed to find a place for the printer and the computers. so the printer and my husband's laptop lives in the kitchen. yes, our kitchen is part office. for the first fewmonths we kept the stroller in the middle of the room. as a lot of new yorkers do. and it drove me crazy. istarted looking online for stroller storage solutions and there isone product that's marketed toword urban moms. it's a hook and it cost 60 bucks! i went to the hardware store and for four dollars i got these two hooks that are on top of my coat closet.

and this is how we store our stroller. we fold it and we lift it and hang it on the hooks. and that's where our stroller lives. on the back of the coat closet. so this is our bedroom. (kid) "and it's mine, too!" and it's his too. henry, where's your bed? (kid) "it is right here." his bed is six inches from our bed. welcome to one bedroom parenting.we he was first born, for the first few months we didn't have a crib at all. we just had a very tiny bassinet that we kept on my side of the bed. my side of the bed. and then eventually we got him this crib which

is right now in it's toddler bed convertible mode. we kept the bars on as long as we could people. we don't have a lot of room for extra furniture so our bed is our dresser. i'll show you. here's how our bed works. first, for example, you lift up the blanket, open up the side here's my dad's stuff. so this is where my mom keeps her tshirts. another great thing to have in a small space is some sort of sound making machine. for when the parents are making noise

in very next room and you don't want to wake up the baby. voila!and when you husband is watching loud, violet, insane tv shows with a lot of shooting and yelling and you're trying to sleep. voila! sound machine. for years i've been trying to use this when i pooped in my pants. my babysitters would use this. this is a changing table. right now we don't have the pad on top of it because henry doesn't need it as a changing table anymore but we use it as his dresser. so everything has to have dual use and dual storage. like a submarine.

i do use these drawers a lot. this is my closet. and it's my closet, too! well, partially. this is where we keep henry's hanging clothes. as his closet, he has this very tiny area kid: it's a lot of clothes! see? to him it's a lot of clothes! we would think that's not a enough space for a kid. he needs a whole closet. but he doesn't know any different! this is the hallway leading fromthe living room to our bedroom. and it's got a lot of hidden storage in it as well. this closet is our linen closet, medicine cabinet, toiletry cabinet

makeup station my husband's toolbox. and all the momcave giveaways. and they all live in this closet. and we use a lot of extra storage things. like hanging this on the inside of the door. never waste the inside of a door. there's tons ofstorage space on the inside of a door. there's another hidden cabinet on the way to the bedroom. it has a full length mirror on it. it latches to the wall. and it is meant for shoe storage. why is it empry? i've been very good about clearing ourclutter lately. so it's empty for now. until i go shoe shopping again.

one other great thing about this apartment isdoes have a walk in closet in the hallway. it's mine! someother people that live in the same apartment line in this building actually use this as a child's bedroom. because you could fit a toddler bed and a tiny dresser in there. maybe. i don't know. because all i have in there is clothes. and purses. and shoes. and some momcave stuff. but mostly shoes. lots of my shoes are on this shoe rack. lest you think i'm a compulsive shopper, i am a shoe model.

and i get lots of shoes for free. so inside of this walk-in closet i keep my jewelry hanging on the wall. i use all the vertical space possible. pile things to the ceiling.there are occasional avalanches but for the most part it worked atnd i did say this was onlymy closet. hat's not entirely true. we do keep some of henry's toysin this closet where they are easy for him to get to. right hen? and i keep this log cabin

this gigantic piece of furniture in the living room hides a lot of stuff. people come over and they say, "i don't see toys everywhere?!?" they were everywhere. i just hurried up and hid them all before you got here! and a lot of them go in here. this side is where we keep henry's toys. (kid) "and i like them!!" on the other side, this is all daddy's work stuff. this is all bill paying stuff and this is all mom's work stuff. this is a thing that i didn't even think of for the small spaces video but

but henry just pulled these headphones out of daddy's shelf. and what these are, are wireless headphones. so there's a transmitter. you hook this up to your tv. any tv. and you can watch tv in the same room with someone without waking them up. or being noisy. (kid) "sometimes when i was little and i was a baby, he wanted to snuggle me and watch tv. so he would put these on and watch tv and snuggle." (kid) "this is my play kitchen. ha ha ha!" perfect size for an apartment. this is his play kitchen. and the rest of his toys that aren't in cabinet are in this basket here. and that's where we hide all of the toys!

that's it. that's our apartment. while nice to have the challenge of trying tofit everything into one bedroom apartment with a kid, if anybody has a bigger apartment thatthey just want to, you know, lend us for a few years, we'll take it. we'll totally take it. thanks for watching. if you like our momcave videos, please like subscribe comment. if you have a comment about how you live in asmall space leave it below. if you have a lead on cheaper bigger apartment in new york city, also leave that below!

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