"We'll get higher and higher, straight up we'll climb."
We live in a tiny home. It’s not tiny in the sense that all of the furniture is miniaturized a la that car insurance commercial, which is too bad in some ways since such a dinette set would give us enough room to navigate the kitchen. Our home is tiny in the sense that we have little floor space. It’s like we’re living in a Manhattan apartment without all those pesky crowds or culture getting in the way.
This limited space forces us to live vertically, covering virtually every inch of baseboard with a piece of furniture, and attaching shelves to the wall above most of the furniture. For example, we have side-by-side dressers in our bedroom with shelves above them for holding pictures and books, and an entertainment center in the living room with shelves above it for holding large heavy objects capable of damaging electronic equipment when the shelves fall off the wall.
Our system worked well when we installed it in our home after moving into it about two years ago. At the time, Abbie was still a newborn, and the only motion she was capable of was moving her limbs in random directions and of course spitting up. When Abbie started crawling, she taught us about childproofing, and what furniture does and doesn’t work. For example, a six-foot tall stick-design floor lamp doesn’t work. Eventually she started pulling fragile objects like remote controls and valuable coupons off of low shelves, and I started moving things higher. Then she started climbing on furniture, and I moved things a little higher.
Now she’s mastered climbing on furniture, and I’m running out of places to store things. I now realize that our side-by-side furniture layout provides a handy bridge system for her to climb across. She can climb onto a dining chair, crawl across the dining table, onto the adjacent portable dishwasher, over to the bordering kitchen counter next to it, and stand up to reach the pantry and its treasure of sugar-sweetened foods that daddy normally rations out.
It took me a few boxes of dumped Fruit Rings, but I eventually learned to pull the chair away from the table when I’m done to protect the pantry. More problematic is the array of storage devices in the kids’ room. There’s one specific spot where Abbie can reach in front of her and find some cheap plastic drawers we use for clothes, reach to her right and find Ian’s crib, and reach to her left and find the changing table. She has learned to scale this obstacle by placing her hands and feet on various vertical surfaces at 90- and 180- degree angles in a synchronicity that would awe most mountain climbers. Doing so gives her access to Ian’s crib and the pacifier I often leave in there, or the top of the changing table. From the top of the changing table, she can reach all sorts of goodies, like the wipe warmer filled with a seemingly limitless number of wipes to stew about the floor, or the shelves above the changing table that are filled with objects that I intentionally stored up there because I didn’t want her to grab them, like the pacifier that I occasionally remember to move from Ian’s crib or the few lift-the-flap books that survived Abbie’s flap-tearing clutches.
When I entered her room one day and found wipes and dismembered flaps littering the floor, I knew exactly what to do; I moved all the surviving fragile books to the cabinets above their closets. Those cabinets are so high I need a stepstool to reach them.
This limited space forces us to live vertically, covering virtually every inch of baseboard with a piece of furniture, and attaching shelves to the wall above most of the furniture. For example, we have side-by-side dressers in our bedroom with shelves above them for holding pictures and books, and an entertainment center in the living room with shelves above it for holding large heavy objects capable of damaging electronic equipment when the shelves fall off the wall.
Our system worked well when we installed it in our home after moving into it about two years ago. At the time, Abbie was still a newborn, and the only motion she was capable of was moving her limbs in random directions and of course spitting up. When Abbie started crawling, she taught us about childproofing, and what furniture does and doesn’t work. For example, a six-foot tall stick-design floor lamp doesn’t work. Eventually she started pulling fragile objects like remote controls and valuable coupons off of low shelves, and I started moving things higher. Then she started climbing on furniture, and I moved things a little higher.
Now she’s mastered climbing on furniture, and I’m running out of places to store things. I now realize that our side-by-side furniture layout provides a handy bridge system for her to climb across. She can climb onto a dining chair, crawl across the dining table, onto the adjacent portable dishwasher, over to the bordering kitchen counter next to it, and stand up to reach the pantry and its treasure of sugar-sweetened foods that daddy normally rations out.
It took me a few boxes of dumped Fruit Rings, but I eventually learned to pull the chair away from the table when I’m done to protect the pantry. More problematic is the array of storage devices in the kids’ room. There’s one specific spot where Abbie can reach in front of her and find some cheap plastic drawers we use for clothes, reach to her right and find Ian’s crib, and reach to her left and find the changing table. She has learned to scale this obstacle by placing her hands and feet on various vertical surfaces at 90- and 180- degree angles in a synchronicity that would awe most mountain climbers. Doing so gives her access to Ian’s crib and the pacifier I often leave in there, or the top of the changing table. From the top of the changing table, she can reach all sorts of goodies, like the wipe warmer filled with a seemingly limitless number of wipes to stew about the floor, or the shelves above the changing table that are filled with objects that I intentionally stored up there because I didn’t want her to grab them, like the pacifier that I occasionally remember to move from Ian’s crib or the few lift-the-flap books that survived Abbie’s flap-tearing clutches.
When I entered her room one day and found wipes and dismembered flaps littering the floor, I knew exactly what to do; I moved all the surviving fragile books to the cabinets above their closets. Those cabinets are so high I need a stepstool to reach them.
posted by Matt at
11:30 PM
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