Living Well
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The Honest Home: Part 10 of 13 – Small Apartment, Small Social Life and The Shrinking Effect
About five years ago I moved to Vienna from Chicago. Early on, I asked my wife where people here hang out with their friends. She told me most of the time everyone meets somewhere in the city, and then afterward each person goes their separate way, back to their own home. That was a world…
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The Honest Home: Part 9 of 13 – Indoor Plants in a Small Apartment: The Hope and the Failure
Most of the plants that come into our home end up dying. I want to say that plainly, because I think a lot of people are quietly carrying the same thing and assuming it’s a personal defect. It isn’t. Let me explain what’s actually going on. Why they die, honestly. Yes, I forget sometimes. That’s…
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The Honest Home: Part 8 of 13 – Furniture for a Small Apartment: When the Space and the Standard Sizes Don’t Match
Furniture in a small apartment sometimes feels like trying on a shoe that is two sizes too small. At first it looks like it will fit. Then you get it home, and it doesn’t. I have an advantage most people don’t. I draw and plan our spaces before we buy anything. My wife and I…
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The Honest Home: Part 7 of 13 – Noise in a Small Apartment: Sound and the Courtyard Problem
The problem with the noise was never that it was loud. It was that it is constant. There is a difference, and you only understand it once you have lived inside it. A loud sound ends. Constant sound becomes the air you breathe. You stop hearing individual noises and start living inside a low, unbroken…
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The Honest Home: Part 6 of 13 – No Natural Light in Your Apartment and The Nature You Can’t See
Let me be honest about the view from our apartment. There isn’t one. To see the sky, I have to press my face against the window. To see a single tree, I have to stick my head all the way outside. That is not a view. That is a search. For a long time I…
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The Honest Home: Part 5 of 13 – Screens and Tension
We don’t have a TV in the apartment. My wife and I both got rid of our own before we even knew each other. When we met, it turned out to be one of the things we agreed on, and we decided to keep it that way. We have kept that promise. That does not…
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The Honest Home: Part 4 of 13 – Toys, Kids and the Guilt Trap
Here is the truth about toys in a small apartment. The problem was never the toys. It is where they end up. We have a toy zone. We built a custom pantry that most small apartments don’t have, and toys take up the majority of it now. It wasn’t built for toys. It just became…
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The Honest Home: Part 3 of 13 – The Floor Problem
The Honest Home, Part 3 of 13 – The Floor Problem Lets talk about something that gets my blood boiling like nothing else in our apartment. The floors. We had real hardwood floors once. When they renovated the building, they replaced them with something new. Three millimeters of what I can only describe as the…
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The Honest Home: Part 2 of 13 – Clutter and the Illusion of Organisation
The Honest Home, Part 2 of 13 – Clutter and the Illusion of Organisation We built custom furniture. Measured every centimetre. Thought carefully about what goes where. My family was my client, I was the designer and builder. We invested real money and real time into making our small apartment work better. It does work…
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Living Well: The Honest Home, Part 1 of 13 – Our Home Has a Problem. So Does Yours. Here’s Where We Start.
Living Well: The Honest Home, Part 1 of 13 – Our Home Has a Problem. So Does Yours. Here’s Where We Start. I’m going to tell you something I haven’t said out loud before. Our apartment stresses me out. Not occasionally. Daily. The kind of low-grade tension that’s easy to dismiss because nothing is technically…