300 Square Feet

326 square feet if I'm being exact. We have been living in 326 square feet (30.3 square meters) in Germany since October 8th and before that bouncing beds since September 10th. I know for someone living down town NYC or Tokyo 326 sq ft would be a dream, but it's all about perspective. Neither one of us has ever lived downtown anywhere and our previous home had a spacious 1,700+ square feet plus a half acre lot. So from our perspective, this was tiny! Luckily though, the temporary housing offered us everything we needed: towels, furniture, bed linens, kitchen dishes, and so on. We also found ways to make this place more homey and the space more usable.

First thing we did was to add command hooks to the hallway for coats and Zoey's leash. The bench and bed provided space for hidden shoe storage before our shoe rack arrived in our air crate this week.

We also added some plants that were gifted to us and pumpkins we got at a local pumpkin patch with friends.

More recently we added Christmas lights on our hall mirror. Due to the fact that the only doors in our space are the entry door and the bathroom door, you can see the Christmas lights from the living room, kitchen, and bedroom all at the same time.

A more practical solution to some of our space issue was to go vertical. We stacked suitcases on top of wardrobes as well as made one into a laundry basket and another held anything we weren't using at the moment. One became an end table by the chairs and others were used to fill in unused spaces. Slowly but surely this temporary place started feeling more and more like home.

While we did have a "kitchen", we didn’t really cook. Most days we had coffee for breakfast (supplied by the housing), we each ate a light lunch of fruit, crackers, deli meat and cheese we bought at the store, or leftovers from the night before. Dinner we ordered in almost every night. The first few weeks we were here we were able to go out and try new restaurants but Covid cases increased and all restaurants became takeout or delivery only. We have had fun exploring the different menus from the comfort of our room.

One of our favorite things we've been able to do so far is go on walks around the city together. To be

honest, we aren't able to do much more than that right now. Either Saturday or Sunday morning we walk to the main train station to get Starbucks (the only coffee place that is currently doing take out), then walk around different parts of the city that we like or we explore someplace new. One of our favorites is to sit on the steps in Kennedy Platz, the city center, or go find a bench near the university.

Most of our time in temporary housing has been spent trying to find a permanent place to live. Every night we discuss new houses that popped on the market that day, whether or not we like them, if we have a viewing scheduled, if we got one that we previously put our names in for, and more. There will be more on this process in another post to come later.

One other thing we accomplished during our time in our 326 square feet is watching the entirety of the Star Wars series. Ha - bet you weren't expecting me to say that! We realized a few months ago that neither of us had seen them all. Jesse had seen a few of the more recent ones and I had seen parts of almost every one of them but never a full movie. So we watched them in chronological order as was recommended to us by a google search and we were pleasantly surprised!

What else do you want to know about our time in 326 square feet?