Eight feet times ten feet. Eighty square feet total. Calculator in hand, I was fully aware that my new bedroom was smaller than many flat dwellers’ walk-in closets.
My realtor had generously described it as “cosy” and “efficient.” Had I not been desperate to find somewhere cheap to live, I should have seen these keywords as red flags rather thanselling points. It took standing inside that empty rectangle to really feel defeated. A bedroom needs furniture to function, sure.
But how do you fit a life into this tiny space? Bed, desk, dresser … how much quality of life could I possibly cram into this tiny slit?
I could picture where each piece would go as I stood there but having a mental blueprint didn’t magically enlarge the square footage.
I hadn’t even measured when I bought my bedroom set. Okay, yes, I wrote down the room’s measurements on paper. But looking at numbers on paper and seeing how they translate to actual space are wildly different things.
The queen bed I ordered online made my bedroom feel half its size. The deliverymen chuckled when I told them where it was staying (they weren’t mocking, but dangit felt rude nonetheless). One of them even commented that his toolshed was larger.
So, the queen bed went back. That hurt, but I’ll never make that mistake again: Downsizing your furniture to fit a small space doesn’t just mean going from king to queen to full. You need to totally rethink the way furniture is used.
A full-size bed pushed up against the corner – not centred on the wall like magazines would have you believe, but actually touching the corner. Angling my bed like that opened up floor space while creating distinct areas in the room. It also allowed me to use the wall as a headboard and forgo purchasing one altogether.
Winning. Talking about dressers, I had to ditch that plan altogether. Traditional dressers are deep.
Like, 18–20 inches deep! There was no way I could squeeze that into my bedroom without it dominating every square inch of floor space. Instead, I found a slim console table that was only twelve inches deep and purchased stacking drawer units to slip inside.
It wasn’t glamorous, but it totally worked. Everything fit, the visual footprint was much smaller, and I could walk around my bed without busting out into my grandma shuffle. Storage space was a constant battle.
Every inch of space mattered. Plastic storage bins that could slide under my bed (you know the ones I’m talking about, the roller ones because dragging giant suitcases ofStorage Cube across carpet sucks). Floating shelves around two sides, near the ceiling.
They weren’t purely decorative like many tiny-home shelves I’d seen; those took up valuable closet space that I needed for, well, clothes. My shelves served as both storage and decoration. Speaking of closets.
Ugh, don’t get me started on my closet. It was a total makeover. The closet itself was barely four feet wide.
The depth was much shorter than a standard closet too, which meant my clothes had to hang at an angle just to fit. I removed the single rod and replaced it with a double-rod system, keeping shorter hanging items on top and longer on the bottom. Shelf dividers helped keep folded clothes from falling over, and I hung an over-the-door organizer that was labelled shoes but honestly stores way more than that (phone chargers, hair ties, random electronics).
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My light fixture made a huge impact on the overall feel of my bedroom. A single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling… yeck. Golden puck lights were out of my budget, so I settled for the plug-in version instead.
Twinkly lights strung around the perimeter of my room (yes, it does sound super dorm-room, but mine were white LED with a dimmer). Small lamp on my dresser-console. Clip-on reading light for my bed.
Mirror, mirror on the wall? Honestly, it works. Hang a large mirror on the wall opposite your window and it instantly makes your room feel bigger.
It’s not magic, just science. But after I put that mirror up, I instantly felt like I had more breathing room. Colour also played a big role in making my small bedroom work.
I loved the idea of painting my walls white to make the space feel as bright as possible. However, plain white actually highlighted how small my bedroom was rather than downplaying it. I ended up going with a super soft sage green (Hey, pretty close to the ugly flat paint I started off with!).
Light-coloured walls are still ideal, you just don’t want pure white. Soft sage broke up the monotony of the wall colour and made the walls feel farther away. It also added warmth to the room and didn’t show every fingerprint like pure white would.
Accepting that some of “my stuff” wouldn’t fit was heartbreaking. No reading chair snuggled up in the corner (goddammit, I wanted one). Full-length mirror took up too much space, so I hung mine on the wall (again!).
Twin nightstands wouldn’t fit on either side of my bed, but floating shelves secured to the wall did the trick. Honestly, every furniture piece was a battle against physics. Everyone who came over asked me how I made my small room feel so spacious.
Trust me, there wasn’t one ingenious hack I pulled. It was dozens of little tricks added together: Keeping surfaces clear of clutter. Using furniture with legs instead of those awful coffee table/storage bin monsters with drawers that scrape the ground.
Vertical storage whenever possible. Making sure everything had a “home” so clutter couldn’t build up. I love my cozy bedroom more than I love myself.
KIDDING. But not really. I never thought I’d say this, but small can be beautiful.
Once I found a layout that worked and had everything build around it, my small bedroom went from claustrophobic chaos to cozily compact.
Sure, I wouldn’t mind a bigger bedroom. But if I were faced with an eighty-square-foot room again, I wouldn’t run screaming like I did the first time.
It wasn’t until I lived in that small space that I truly learned what “functional” meant when it came to furnishing and decorating. Hindsight 2020: my bed placement was stupid. Would I decorate an eighty-square-foot bedroom again?
In a heart beat. Every single inch had to be carefully considered. Every piece of furniture had to justify its reason for existence.
Stop fighting the smallness. Use it to your advantage. Decorate for your lifestyle, not how you think you should be living.
