This isn't living in 80 square feet. This is bedrooming in 80 square feet. There's a gigantic difference.
There's no mention of cooking, bathroom, or other shared space. Congratulations, you actually live in a much larger space than you admit.
My first apartment in Paris was ~118 square feet (11m2), but that was INCLUDING a kitchenette, an enclosed bathroom (toilet, shower, and second sink), and an inward slanting wall (it was inside the building roof) which eliminated maybe a good fifth of the volume, and also no closet.
And I lived there with my partner, so there were two people sharing that space, with two peoples' worth of clothing and coats and computers and other materials and dishes and pots and pans and luggage, and two peoples' worth of constantly being in someone else's way.
And only that last detail, the constant interminable contact with another person, was difficult.
"Don't be a slob", "Don't accumulate shit", and "Don't be stupid with your space" are just so obnoxiously obvious as to be entirely unhelpful suggestions for anyone with half a brain cell.
And "Don't bother putting things away" is a clear sign to me that this person doesn't know what small is, because when you live in an actually small space, putting things away neatly improves your mental state significantly. You will notice your improved condition when you have that extra few feet of floor, desk, and shelf space.
Real functional advice would be things like "You'd be surprised at how much space you can save by replacing certain bulky items with compact travel/camping equivalents." Get rid of big fluffy bath towels that take forever to dry, and get small linen ones instead ( We have a few of these, and now I'd never buy anything else regardless of available space https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WBC17N4/ ). The same goes for comforters and winter coats that you're going to want to stow in the summer, bags, dishes, and so forth.
I don't really see the issue. This is well withon the bounds of acceptable and coaching the key points in more passive language would just make it longer with very little upside.
I mean, in other communities it would be a good thing. But I'd prefer to keep that kind of tone-policing away from HN and focus on content.
Neutral tone tends to take up less space consider the same content but:
"Don't be a slob", "Don't accumulate shit", and "Don't be stupid with your space" are obvious and therefore unhelpful. You will notice your improved condition when you have that extra few feet of floor space so do Put things away.
Useful advice is more inline with: "Replace bulky items with compact travel/camping equivalents." "small linen towels instead of big fluffy bath ones that take forever to dry" (I'd never buy anything else https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00WBC17N4/) Also, things you want to store over summer like comforters and winter coats along with, bags, dishes, and so forth.
I've lived in a 400sqft loft for two years with my SO. Anyone who finds this style of living romantic is either foolish or doesn't mind throwing their money at problems that can be fixed simply by adding more space.
When you shrink down your living environment WITHOUT an optimally designed environment, there's nothing romantic about it.
I had a perfect apartment for me. It was 596 sq ft, but split over 2.5 floors - equally-sized basement (one room/laundry & utility closet) and main floor (kitchen/bathroom/living room), plus a 1/4-sized lofted bedroom above it.
My partner of a few years moved in with me, and we quickly realized we had to find a new place if we were going to live together. If one person coughed in the basement, the other person could hear it in the bedroom. No amount of putting up sound-reducing barriers helped.
It looks romantic from the outside, maybe cute and cozy, but day-to-day it takes a very special kind of patience to deal with.
I do have friends who live in about 300 sq ft in New York City, somewhere in the East 60s. Their apartment has that exact "romantic" feel to it, but they only survive because they live in NYC and can spend the majority of their time doing things (together or separately) anywhere but their apartment.
At a size like 400sqft it all comes down to design. That's enough space for a main room with kitchen, a plenty-roomy bath, a small bedroom, and two offices.
Paris apartment bathrooms. Why did you have to bring up Paris apartment bathrooms? Of all the myriad sharp edges of actually trying to live in Paris, the apartment bathrooms are the one memory that I try to suppress.
Was yours like the one that we had? With the toilet INSIDE OF the shower? Saving space is a virtue, to be sure, but I was not proud to live like that. It was so...damp.
It wasn't inside the shower. How would that even work? Where do you stand when showering?
Do you mean that there's no separation between the toilet and shower? If so, then yes. But we had a corner curtain affixed to the wall to keep from splashing the toilet.
I stayed at an apartment in Venice Italy and the toilet was in the middle of the shower. So you could literally poo and shower at the same time if you really wanted too haha.
They also had floor urinals at some public spaces which, while odd, has the upside of being functional for women.
> I stayed at an apartment in Venice Italy and the toilet was in the middle of the shower. So you could literally poo and shower at the same time if you really wanted too haha.
That's amazing. I bet it either makes you feel really clean after or not very clean after, depending on which you're trying to do!
I once stayed at a backpackers in Hong Kong with a bathroom so cramped that the only way to use the shower was to put the toilet lid down and stand on top of the commode.
In Europe full featured apartments under 20m2 (~215 square feet) are pretty standard. I personally know quite a few people that are living in such apartments with kids. 11m2 sounds like standard European bedroom in apartment.
There may be cities where this is the case, but this surely isn't standard. I'm European but I never saw something like that nor could I recall having read such an offer for an apartement.
Plenty of them in Stockholm and Paris. I once shared a 20m^2 flat with my partner; it worked alright. Just can't accumulate a lot of stuff. To give you an idea, here are some for sale in Stockholm county right now:
Here's a 9.5m^2 (!) apartment for sale (including bed, work area, tiny kitchen, toilet, shower), although it's marketed as something in the middle between hotel room and apartment (that's one way to put it, I guess):
On the hemnet link, if you sarch for less then 20qm it finds 12. If you search eg. for 30-40qm it finds more then 600. Doesn't look like <20qm would be some kind of standard.
> My first apartment in Paris was ~118 square feet (11m2), but that was INCLUDING a kitchenette, an enclosed bathroom (toilet, shower, and second sink), and an inward slanting wall (it was inside the building roof) which eliminated maybe a good fifth of the volume, and also no closet.
> But an 8x10 bedroom for one? So?
It sounds like you're describing your main room as similar or even larger than 80 square feet, so I don't see how your story is supposed to trounce theirs. They might have access to a shared space but if they don't use it then it doesn't really matter.
The hard part, as you said, is sharing that small an area with someone else the entire day. Which is a separate issue from whether the shared room is 50 square feet or 150 square feet.
> It sounds like you're describing your main room as...
Oh dear, "main room". Which room was the not-main room?
> They might have access to a shared space but if they don't use it then it doesn't really matter.
So you're saying they never go to the bathroom, shower, or eat. Sure thing, boss.
Let me ask you a question. If you and your partner share a car, do you have a car or do you not have a car?
If your partner is always the one who drives whenever you go somewhere, does that change your answer?
Shared space isn't magically gone just because it's shared.
> The hard part, as you said, is sharing that small an area with someone else the entire day. Which is a separate issue from whether the shared room is 50 square feet or 150 square feet.
That means that fitting even two peoples' worth of belongings is not the hard part. That means the author is being entirely self-aggrandizing with intent to deceive. That means "BFD".
The bathroom. I should have said main room(s), but with you emphasizing the smallness and highlighting the bathroom as enclosed I assumed there was only one.
> So you're saying they never go to the bathroom, shower, or eat.
You have deeply misunderstood me. I'm saying that when it comes to calculating space to compare to the article, what matters is how many square feet are dedicated to the place(s) where you put the bed and the desk.
Did you have less than 80 square feet dedicated to that? Because when you describe a 118sqft apartment with bathroom, it sounds like after subtracting the bathroom you actually had more space than the article's 80sqft.
So why are you bored at how large the article's space is in comparison to your own experience?
> Shared space isn't magically gone just because it's shared.
Of course. I'm suggesting that he is not using any shared space outside of the bathroom. And a bathroom easily fits in less than 38sqft.
You're probably right, then maybe let's back up. I'm saying that it's delusional to say "I live in" instead of "I sleep in". Describing just your bedroom isn't the same as describing your living space unless you actually have no other space available, and I just do not believe that to be the case for the author because the author didn't mention it. And it's definitely the sort of thing that one would mention when writing something like this if it were the case.
And then I further said, from experience, that 80ft2 is just plenty of space for one person's bedroom. And I described the experience showing that even two people can fit in that space without problems relating to storing things.
I then said as a follow-on that the hot pro tips given in the original post are entirely useless, and that the displayed "don't put things away" mindset is evidence of him not actually being tight on space to begin with.
The article really just sounds like a kid showing up to the same small university dorm that millions of other people went through and thinking that he's a special genius because...what...because he bought a corner desk through Amazon? Please.
> when it comes to calculating space to compare to the article, what matters is how many square feet are dedicated to the place(s) where you put the bed and the desk.
We can go there if you want, but you're leaving out that that's also per person.
> it sounds like after subtracting the bathroom you actually had more space than the article's 80sqft.
It sounds like you forgot to divide by two.
> And a bathroom easily fits in less than 38sqft.
I'm going to assume you meant to include kitchenette as well in that. You'd be surprised how quickly square footage adds up. And you still at the end have to divide the space by the number of people, because nearly every thing isn't shared between partners though they are sharing the spaces. Even the bed needs to be twice as large if you want to not go insane in the process.
> I'm saying that it's delusional to say "I live in" instead of "I sleep in".
He has his desk in the bedroom. I don't see any reason to assume he uses other rooms unless he mentions them.
> It sounds like you forgot to divide by two.
It seemed like you were unimpressed by the space itself.
> The article really just sounds like a kid showing up to the same small university dorm that millions of other people went through and thinking that he's a special genius because...what...because he bought a corner desk through Amazon? Please.
I won't disagree there.
> And then I further said, from experience, that 80ft2 is just plenty of space for one person's bedroom. And I described the experience showing that even two people can fit in that space without problems relating to storing things.
Okay, that's fine then if you were calling your experience comparable. It really seemed to me like you were saying your past experience was significantly smaller. If you weren't doing that, then I apologize and have no further argument.
> I don't see any reason to assume he uses other rooms unless he mentions them.
My eyes are rolling so hard they might get arrested.
> It seemed like you were unimpressed by the space itself.
I am.
> It really seemed to me like you were saying your past experience was significantly smaller.
It was. You're still forgetting to divide the non-bathroom and cooking space by two. Let's be really generous and say that my bathroom and kitchenette were made for ants and took up zero space instead of probably ~28ft2 (3x8 + 2x2). This is of course not true, but it gives an upper bound on the possible square feet per person, 59. Of course if you subtract that 28 first, you end up with 45. And of course let us not forget that 3/4 of one wall had a 45 degree inward slant. So that wall is entirely unusable, as is the space above it.
If you want to yawn about the space itself, then I won't divide by two.
> My eyes are rolling so hard they might get arrested.
It's not unreasonable to think he lives out of a single room, and I want to give him a tiny bit of credit to think he's not the worst blog-writer in the world.
> If you want to yawn about the space itself, then I won't divide by two.
Area(really volume)-per-one-occupant's-reasonable-belongings-and-bed-space-needs-times-the-number-of-occupants is the metric that matters. If he were three people instead of one then it would be different. If he had a child, then it would be different. If he had a dog, then it would be different. But he doesn't. He's sleeping alone in a moderate-size bedroom, something that many people do without bragging about it, and publicly patting himself on the back for buying a computer desk and shelves.
> It's not unreasonable to think he lives out of a single room
It is, because that's not what he does. He sleeps, computes, and dresses himself (let's assume) in a single room. He necessarily excretes and washes (and probably eats) somewhere else unless he has those facilities in the room and just accidentally failed to mention it in his excitement over living in the 21st century. Sleep is only a fraction of domesticity. Though I admit it's possible that he's also that guy with the anti-bathing blog who complains that women discriminate against him by not fellating him just because he smells bad.
> I want to give him a tiny bit of credit to think he's not the worst blog-writer in the world.
Given the amount of space he spends delighting in having finally discovered Amazon, I don't feel so generous. But I'm also just mean about things like this.
I've been and known lots of people in NYC with no bathroom (shared, down the hall) and no kitchen (they just eat out every night, or worst case grab some chicken cutlets from a deli on the way home from work). So those things missing isn't really indicative.
It means you don't have it in your bedroom. Because having something is not the same thing as not having something, and it doesn't matter if that thing is shared with a small collective or isn't directly attached. It means that when you live in an environment with shared bathrooms, then your notion of "living in" is wrong if you don't include them. There is an important difference between "I live in" and "I sleep in".
Until last December, I would live in rooms well under 100 square feet, for about four years. I won't go into details how I got there, but surprisingly, money wasn't the issue. Anywho. I kind of got used to it and it wasn't half bad in the end (Stockholm syndrome kicking in?). My 2c:
1. Get systematic about tidying your room. A pile of clothes is a lot larger than a tiny column and it takes minutes to arrange. Also, clean up right after the fact (especially if it takes no time) and don't leave things for later - a case in point - food. If you eat in your room, take the plates and stuff to the kitchen ASAP, don't leave it be.
2. Use shelves and boxes. I had most of my stuff in shelves above my table, but it soon got out of control. I got a few shoe boxes (for cables and stuff I didn't need to look at) and bought some transparent plastic boxes (for things I needed to glance at). Use lids for stuff you don't access often.
3. Don't get rid of things you care about. I know, space is precious, I got rid of my lovely Dell computer monitor. But I never got rid of my books, even though they took up most of shelf space (and I read on my Kindle anyway).
4. Cherish common areas. I presume you have a bathroom, kitchen and possibly a living room in the building you live in. Figure out when others are not using these areas and hang out there for a bit. Make your work/leisure station portable. I would often cook while watching YouTube lectures or listening to audiobooks (iPad with a kickstand, bluetooth speaker). Or would go to the living room to watch telly while catching up on email.
5. Use your luggage. I would have a suitcase on top of my wardrobe. I would put my winter clothes during the summer there and vice versa. You'd be surprised how much that helps.
6. Get an air freshener. Sounds a bit weird, but in such an enclosed space, any odour can get irritating, because it's everywhere, because everywhere defines quite a compact area :-) I got something from a Coop, a few quid, plugged in a few times a week.
Actually, in France, it would be illegal to rent such a place for housing (as apartments have to have at least a main room that is more than 9m²), even for students.
The Reddit crowd represents a mainstream of digital nomads, but not all. Among the Eastern European/former USSR hitchhiking community are a lot of translators and software devs who often organize a joint rental in various cities around the world as a base, but are perfectly content to work from a stealthily pitched tent while they are on the road to somewhere more comfortable.
Myself, I used to be very active in this scene before eventually making the leap into bicycle touring, where I continue to work from my tent or rural cafes. I regularly meet other cyclists who are digital nomads. It's pretty neat that thanks to 3G internet access being so plentiful, you can tour some of Earth's most beautiful landscapes almost self-sufficiently and still put in at least a couple of hours of work a day. The only hassles is finding places to charge electronics.
However, at least here, the idea is that if you are cash-strapped (and thus you have to rent a tiny place), you need to save money in all possible ways.
This means that you need to cook your own food. I cook, and I tell you that i couldn't make it if i had only one hot plate. I would need at least a 3-burner kitchen with a stove. And a microwave. And you shouldn't put things on top of the microwave. Plus a reasonably sized fridge, because you save money by buying in bulk.
In the same way i definitely must have my own washing machine and -if drying space isn't available- a drying machine,
> so many services are normally available covering anything
> lacking for space.
otherwise spending on a cleaning service gets very expensive here, basically in two or three months the service costs you as much as a washing machine.
Of course, not cooking your food can make a big impact on your finances here. And mind you, this (Peru) is a country with cheap meals. But cooking your own is still cheaper.
As for clothes, i can't see how 3-4 outfits is enough. I work in business suit and I need at least 3 business suits, then add the regular/casual outfits and the sport outfits and you are counting about 9-12 outfits. Business suits shouldn't be folded.
There's a lot of foods you can eat without having to cook them, or that you can cook with just a single electric burner. You can buy a mini dorm fridge + small microwave if you really need one, but simply buying whatever is on sale like meat that is about to expire or very ripe fruit is a good way to still save money without needing a lot of space.
Washer and dryer uses a lot of electricity and water, so while it is more expensive to go to the laundrymat it's not as much as you might think, especially vs the savings of living in a very small space. Wearing your clothes more than once helps a lot, and even in a small space you can usually find somewhere to hang suits. Usually the back of a door is good.
There's a lot of people out there that make it work. :)
Thanks for sharing! It's impressive how much stuff can be placed there, the use of the space is impressive.
Also interesting is to see that a lot of people living there have such nice clothes, I see people living in huge houses here that dress less impressive...
You probably don't have a kitchen. Maybe a hot plate. (You probably don't have a bathroom of your own, either. Maybe this author does, and doesn't count it as living space. But I doubt it.)
You certainly don't have a washing machine. The building probably does, or else you go to laundromats.
The trouble with small spaces is that they cost unproportionally much to rent. I could probably fit my home life in a 80 sqft apartment but when they rent for much more than 1/10th of a 800 sqft apartment, it's very hard to justify the compromise.
Being willing to share space almost always ends up cheaper.
A bunch of students, for example, can generally outbid a family with 2 workers and 3 kids for a large place. And the students have way lower standards usually. No moral commentary there, just an observation. Fortunately they are generally not after the same spaces.
IMHO it actually sucks when property owners try to hoover up what I'd call the "space sharing discount" by renting out rooms on individual leases in a place where most of the space is shared. The culture (or not) is the thing which makes that arrangement work, and I don't feel like they should get to monetise that.
I believe there are an increasing number of startups operating on exactly this premise though :/
IMHO it actually sucks when property owners try to hoover up what I'd call the "space sharing discount" by renting out rooms on individual leases in a place where most of the space is shared. The culture (or not) is the thing which makes that arrangement work, and I don't feel like they should get to monetise that.
Culture? Nah, if there's a need people will adapt themselves. We rent individual rooms in a couple of 3-bedroom condos, and it's worked fine even as tenants rotated over the years.
Also, while we don't "hoover up" the discount (the total of the rents isn't higher than what we could get renting the whole place), I don't think it'd be wrong to do so, as the arrangement has extra benefits for the tenants: not having to find people to share, not having to worry about an increase on their rent if someone decides to leave or feel guilty about leaving the others with a higher rent, not having to get utility/internet contracts in their name, etc.
Part of it is that you're effectively paying for common infrastructure (corridors, elevators/stairs, etc.) that scale more by the number of units than by the total square footage of living space.
The other problem is that the comfort level of an apartment doesn't really scale linearly. At some point, you reach diminishing returns. However, assuming you have dedicated bathrooms and minimal kitchen spots, it means that doubling size from, say, 400 sq ft to 800 sq ft dramatically increases the effective space to live in that isn't a bathroom or a bed.
House is 8m2, but it is a two level house so the bedroom is not taking up the ground space. She, apparently, lives alone.
She lives in tokyo. 2016 minimum wage in Tokyo has been set to 932 JPY. For a 148 hour month, that's 137,936 JPY that currently means $1252 USD.
Her house costs her about USD $600/mo. So that's about 48% of minimum monthly wage. Assuming she is getting minimum wage, doesn't sound bad at all.
Now here's the deal: in my city the minimum wage is 850 PEN. 48% of that, is USD $123. With $123 here you couldn't afford to live alone renting any kind of house or apartment. You would have to rent a room. That is, no kitchen/washing machine/ clothesline, etc. And a very tiny one at that OR a well-sized one but located in a rather ugly part of the city. (Ugly as in, trash outside everyday, being robbed at gunpoint at night, etc.)
Sadly, Hong Kong can be way worse than these already super-cramped one-room apartments.
The apartments in your link are either tiny 1960s social housing, or subdivided apartments. With the ever-increasing rent, some of these have since then been subdivided further into single beds (a.k.a 'cages' or 'coffins', depending on how they're sealed):
I gave up my flat and moved into a caravan. It's about 75 sq ft and less than 6ft high. Within that is a kitchen (I cook all my own meals, bake bread etc. despite only having gas burners and grill) and a tiny wetroom/bathroom which I built myself. I live and work from here (I make and sell art and store my A3+ printer which I'll be using again soon). 27" monitor, spare bed, work area..
I do my laundry by hand in a bucket. My water tap is operated by a foot pump lol. I do a tiny bit of web work (used to be an Actionscript dev but that career died with Flash, the remaining jobs in that tech don't appeal to me and my CV has such a huge chasm in it now that my professional programming life seems to be over). I'm incredibly poor financially but life is challenging and interesting, the miniature home suits me fine and it's really good fun optimising the space.. just requires an adaptable mindset!
And some is covered with water. Assume a third is unusable, at an average family size of 3 people that would still be nearly 7 million square feet each.
I don't think small space is an issue by itself. It's very manageable if the building has good facilities (shared bathrooms, washing machines) and if you can easily eat outside. More problematic would be noisy environment or lack of window.
I've been decluttering a lot over the past year and "Stop putting things away." is one of the things that took me the longest to get my head around but when I got used to it it made my life so much easier. Reducing the amount of effort it takes to get/store an item means you use it more (cleaning products) but also buy fewer yet nicer things.
Definitely recommend Marie Kondo, both her books take only a few hours to read. The joy thing, though initially weird makes complete sense once you've read both books and she insists that everything has a home in the house - if you don't follow that rule you'll quickly become overwhelmed.
This is much less impressive with 10 or 11 foot ceilings than with 7 or 8 foot ceilings.
That said, even with more space, I think that effective use of space is a much better strategy than upgrading to a larger space. Stuff tends to have a quality to it that is similar to Parkinson's law - it takes up the space allotted to it. The authors techniques could still be useful in an 8000 sq ft mansion.
The desk I built myself last month is a quarter the area of the room described, which actually just about matches what I could expect to get for the same rent that gets me a ~600sf apartment here in Baltimore. So I guess I'm never moving to New York!
The techniques described here are still useful, though. I've found the method of disposing of old clothes to generalize: if you have stuff you never use, put it in a box, write on the lid what's in it, and stuff it in an odd corner of a closet or somewhere else out of the way. If it's still untouched in a year, or when you find you need the space, take it to Goodwill.
Wall-mounted shelves are indeed a marvel. They're easy to build from lumber with hand tools, if you've got the space to do it; it takes time, but you can size them precisely to fit the space where you mean to put them, and for shelves of any size it's it's cheaper in the end than buying the prebuilt sort.
I just stayed in a 8 x 5 sqft NYC hotel room (The Jane).
The bed fills over half of it. It has a 3 foot storage place below the bed and shelf above. The wall away from the bed has 6 x 5 ft mirror making the room seem twice as large. It also has a flat screen TV at foot of bed and 2x 5 window. The walls were thick enough you really couldnt hearbthe neighbors except when closing the door.
What is amazing is that some of the same size rooms have a second bunked bed instead of the shelf. I guess you have to take turns using the stand up space.
I love how this story fits well into our currently economic ideology of vast wealth inequality, evaporating pensions, vanishing healthcare, crumbling infrastructure, labor with no pricing power, etc.
my 'bedroom' is about four sq m. meaning it just about fits my bed. i share the rest of my appartment with others, but its still my appartment, so i can store my stuff wherever i want.
This video is about 20x more interesting than the article, which I think is just getting votes because HN always upvotes anything about living in tiny spaces, even though there no insight or interest in this one.
I lived for a few months in probably 30-40 square feet (2-3m^2), basically a hotel room with nothing but a bed and a window. Meeting up with friends was almost always out in public, except for some movie session every now and then in the room.
I didn't really mind it, but I probably won't ever go below my current 400sqft anytime soon.
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Yawn.
This isn't living in 80 square feet. This is bedrooming in 80 square feet. There's a gigantic difference.
There's no mention of cooking, bathroom, or other shared space. Congratulations, you actually live in a much larger space than you admit.
My first apartment in Paris was ~118 square feet (11m2), but that was INCLUDING a kitchenette, an enclosed bathroom (toilet, shower, and second sink), and an inward slanting wall (it was inside the building roof) which eliminated maybe a good fifth of the volume, and also no closet.
And I lived there with my partner, so there were two people sharing that space, with two peoples' worth of clothing and coats and computers and other materials and dishes and pots and pans and luggage, and two peoples' worth of constantly being in someone else's way.
And only that last detail, the constant interminable contact with another person, was difficult.
But an 8x10 bedroom for one? So?