How to use every foot

Back in 2011, while I was writing a book called All the Money in the World, I interviewed architect Sarah Susanka about the size and scale of American homes. Susanka, author of the Not So Big House series of books, noted that she encountered many homes with unusable rooms — spaces that didn’t reflect how people actually lived. Such waste could be a financial burden for normal folks, but Susanka reported that even her clients with unlimited budgets tended to be happiest with everyday uses for spaces. The goal should be to use “every square foot, every day.”

After recently re-reading All the Money in the World (yep — for the first time in years!), I’ve been thinking of that goal with my new (old) home. We spent a year renovating this historic house, partly to be sure we could use the spaces. Now, a year after moving in, I tracked where everyone was during a normal weekend day, and I am pretty sure we do indeed use the full house — as evidenced by the fact that I turn off lights in every room pretty much every night!

That has been achieved partly by shifting room functions. What is technically a dining room has become the space where the kids can play on the family computer and where I do my puzzles (generally while supervising the computer-using kids). We knocked down walls between a few tiny, ambiguous rooms to create a children’s playroom whose current mess level suggests it has achieved new life.

I know that even pondering these matters is already a function of having more space than is strictly necessary; I definitely used every square foot every day in the NYC apartment we left 12 years ago. But if you are pondering your space, and how it’s used, it might help to remember that a home exists to serve you, and that if you don’t need a space in its traditional function, you don’t need to preserve it for that function. You might be able to use it in a different way.?

So, for instance, if you’re not doing a lot of formal entertaining, maybe that living room could become a playroom (just keep a sofa where a parent can sit and relax!). If you eat at your kitchen table, then a dining room could become a crafting or game room, or a library for a book lover — or your real home office. Habits don’t always follow possessions; plenty of people buy treadmills and never use them. But if a space is not being used, you may as well try shaping it to an activity you think you would do. That increases the chances that you do use every square foot, every day.?

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