Downsizing for a New House

Now that Cody and I are all settled in Anchorage to wait for the arrival of Baby Middleton, we’ve been trying to get ahead on some of our upcoming commitments. One of the biggest commitments we needed to get ahead on was preparing for our big move for next year. We knew that we wanted to secure a new rental home while we were out here because we didn’t want to be scrambling and looking for a place to live (and making the hour drive between Anchorage and Palmer) with a newborn when our AirBnB contract is up in mid-May. So, the last couple of weeks that we’ve been here have been spent house hunting. As you can imagine, we had a wish list. Our wish list included:

  • Close proximity to my new job
  • A minimum of 2b/1ba
  • A fenced yard for the dogs
  • Updated appliances, including a dishwasher
  • A safe neighborhood
  • Good outdoor space
  • Close proximity to hiking trails and/or some sort of recreation area
  • Preferably a single-family home
  • A garage

Well, we ended up getting pretty lucky! We toured a lot of places, but in the end this little place won us over. It hit everything on our wish list with the exception of a garage, but we knew we’d have to be willing to be flexible and the garage wasn’t the most important thing to us.

Now that we have the house secured, we are starting the process of looking at downsizing and good storage solutions. Our house in the Bush is about 2,000 sq. ft. and has 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms. This new house is about 800 sq. ft. and has 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom. Even though Cody and I don’t have a ton of stuff and won’t be bringing anything large like furniture with us, we will be moving into this new little space with the two of us, the new baby, and two rather rambunctious dogs. Because of this change, I’ve been working hard (ok, it’s actually been pretty fun) to brainstorm some ideas for our new, much smaller digs.

Things I’m liking, so far:

This doggy crate coffee table. One of our pups doesn’t need to be crated, but the other absolutely does (she’s young and super high energy, which leads to her getting into everything). In our big house we just have a bedroom that we put her crate in, but that won’t be an option at the new place and I don’t want to take up valuable floor space with something unattractive and not usable for any other purpose.

Vertical wall storage ideas for the baby’s room. The baby’s room is pretty tiny, so I think the more vertical storage, the better! I also don’t plan to get a changing table and instead doing a dresser/changing table combo, so I love this set-up.

A sleek platform bed for our bedroom. I think having a smaller, less cumbersome frame that doubles as storage would be super nice for us.

If you can’t tell, I’ve been going a bit Pinterest crazy looking at ideas. I’m excited to share more as we get closer to the move-in and work more on downsizing. In the meantime, if you want to check out some more of my ideas you can head on over to my Pinterest page!


2 Responses to Downsizing for a New House

  1. My friend found a pretty cloth and a large tray and turned her dog crate into an end table! Another idea for baby storage is those cube shelves mounted on the wall. The pegboard trick works great in a kitchen as well to free up cabinets/drawers to be used for food storage, if that’s a problem. Thinking vertically in a small space is a must!

    • Miraculously, the kitchen is the only area of the house that has a TON of storage. Not sure how we lucked out on that one! I do really like those cube shelves, so thanks for reminding me of them!

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