A Tiny HGTV Problem (Shh! It’s a secret!)

Confession: I am obsessed with HGTV. My favorite show at the moment is Fixer Upper. I kinda want to move to Waco, Texas and stalk Chip & Joanna Gaines until they become best friends with me & my husband. Weird? I think not! (Ok, ok, I know it’s totally weird!). Anyway, I also love Property Brothers, Love It or List It, House Hunters, Flip or Flop, etc. If you watch HGTV, you know the drill.

But, I have a tiny HGTV problem. You know what it is?

When they tour people’s existing homes and the people complain about how they’ve “outgrown” their space. There’s clutter and junk everywhere, and they just “need” to move. They complain about how they don’t have any room in their single-family, 3 bedroom home. How they want 4 bedrooms, a home office, a walk in closet, a man cave, a finished basement, a big kitchen, a 3 car garage, and a personal chef included in the deal.

The problem isn’t that they’ve run out of room. It’s that they have too much stuff.

And it’s mostly junk.

Hear me out: these people are grossly disorganized. And they’re all a bunch of hoarders. The couples featured on HGTV are all hoarders.

You see, I’ve been living tiny since before tiny HGTV programming was a thing. Before Tiny House Hunters was a show. Before Tiny Living was a phrase. Before it became cool to downsize. You could say I’m a tiny living hipster.

My family of four lives in a small apartment outside Manhattan. When I say small, I mean our apartment is less than 600 square feet. And that’s being generous.

And most days? Most days I can see the floor. All of the floor. And all of our things have a place. If we don’t need something, we sell, donate, or toss it. We don’t hang onto it like a monument to stupidity. Like, really, who needs to keep things you never, ever use?

Living small has made me a very practical. It’s forced me to be honest about what I truly need and actually use. It’s made me become organized by default, because the only other option would be to trip over all of our “stuff” all the time.

So, this post marks the beginning of a series of articles on tiny living with children. It’s ok if you have a regular sized house, though. The articles I’m preparing will help you get organized and even make some extra cash while decluttering. Yeah, it’s pretty exciting stuff!