The Rooms We Do not Miss After Downsizing

Sherry’s post a few months ago about what furniture & decor we still own after downsizing was the first time I’d looked back at photos of our previous house in a while. It was a lively walk down memory lane (how has it been 2.5 years since we moved?!). It also jogged my memory about how much “extra house” we used to have. As in, full rooms that were so under-utilized that I’d nearly forgotten about them!

Do not get me wrong: we enjoyed that house. But, as you know, it was a much bigger house than we realized we needed (spending an whole summer in our smaller pink beach house truly clarified that for us – more on that here), and we were excited & relieved to downsize to our current home in Florida. We went from 3,150 square feet in Virginia to 1,400 square feet here – which is less than half the space, for the math nerds out there.

Some rooms here are simply smaller than their Virginia counterparts, but we also have full rooms that are simply totally missing (we went from 3 bathrooms to 1, and no longer have things like a garage, a home office, a dining room, etc). And over the past 2.5 years of living here in our smaller home (through a global pandemic, which resulted in an whole year of at-home learning in our smaller space!) we have certainly put having fewer rooms to the test. And since it has been a few years, and we have gotten along so well without them, I thought it’d be interesting to see which ones we do not miss (and the ones that we do miss).

6 Rooms Versus 14 Rooms

Simply put, our current home has six rooms. A multifunctional room downstairs that has a kitchen on one side and a sitting area on the other, three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a multi-functional family room upstairs that serves as a TV room/office/crafting area/playspace. Here they are:

If you want to read more about those rooms and see more photos of each one, I have linked them below for you:

1. The Kitchen/Sitting Area
2. Our Bedroom
3. The Bathroom
4. Our Daughter’s Bedroom
5. Our Son’s Bedroom
6. The Upstairs Family Room

We are lucky to also have a large upstairs deck, two porches, a pool area, and other outdoor spaces that give us a lot more room to spread out (and thanks to it being pleasant outside nearly year-round here, they get a lot of use!). But as for conditioned indoor rooms, those six spaces are it! We do have a laundry closet in the kitchen and a small hallway that joins some of the rooms, but those do not count as actual rooms by any standard I have ever heard of.

Note: a grand hallway with actual furniture in it – like an entry foyer, can certainly count as a room (for example, our last house’s foyer had an entry table, a chandelier, and two of its own closets within that approximately 12′ x 12′ room – so the real estate listing for that house listed it as a room and included its measurements).

Speaking of our last house, let us compare the FOURTEEN rooms we had there:

1. The Kitchen
2. The Family Room
3. The Dining Room
4. The Office
5. The Downstairs Bathroom
6. The Foyer
7. Our Bedroom
8. Our Bathroom / Walk-In Closet
9. Our Daughter’s Room
10. Our Son’s Room
11. The Hall Bathroom
12. The Art / Homework Room
13. The Laundry Room
14. The Bonus Room

That is a difference of 8 rooms – not including unconditioned spaces – so there is certainly a noticeable difference between the two houses. A funny side note is that our Richmond house also had a GIANT walk-up attic (as large as the whole first floor of the house), a two-car garage, and a large outdoor shed, which are 3 other spaces that we do not have in our current house.

Those three spots could hold a ton of stuff, so along with going down by 8 rooms, we also downsized those extra storage spaces! That is in fact something I am truly proud that we could accomplish. We used to have SO MUCH CRAP in the attic and the garage felt like we constantly needed to clean it out.

The Rooms We *Do not* Missing Having

First, a swift disclaimer: distinct people obviously have distinct needs and wants from their homes. People frequently ask us about “our downsizing journey” (please say that with drama and emotion like every person on Enjoy Island says “our relationship journey”) and we are glad to talk about how things have gone for us, but we are the first to admit that every human on earth will have distinct experiences, opinions, and outcomes.

The point of this list is simply to share our thought process, which might assist you determine what your “must have” spaces are if you are house hunting, renovating, or perhaps simply rethinking the function of a spare room in your house. And if you are thinking about downsizing, this might give you some hope that you will be fine without a [insert room you’ve consistently had here].

Also, we are not writing this to suggest that you demolish a certain room or feel bad about having it. Plenty of these rooms are vital in certain homes and households and, even if not, there is nothing wrong with a room simply being “pleasant to have” either. Heck, we lived in our too-big-for-us house for 7 years before we made the move here! So perhaps your spare bedroom is good for resale, that extra powder room was lively to decorate, or that basement gym is strong for storing fifty-two boxes of holiday decorations. We certainly filled our attic TO THE GILLS. We have been there and we get it.

When we at last got to the place where we were excited (and then extremely relieved) to downsize, we also knew it would involve some sacrifices and compromises compared to our previous home. Honestly what this list showed us upon further reflection is how many of them have not felt like sacrifices in the long run! That truly was the surprise from this hindsight analysis.

Do not Miss: A Foyer

Longtime followers might be surprised by this because we sometimes bemoaned the lack of a foyer in our first two homes. Both were small brick ranches where the front door opened right into the living room. So having a proper entryway in our last house had felt like we’d AT LAST MADE IT. We were fancy people with a foyer!

But looking back on it, that room feels like wasted square footage because we in short never used the front door (we consistently came through the garage) so the foyer was simply extra space to pass through on our way to other rooms. And even though we are back to that door-swings-right-into-living-area scenario here, it honestly has not bothered us. It is like you consistently long for something, at last get it, and realize it is fine but not a deal-breaker if it went away again.

It certainly took some time to figure out a furniture layout that works around the front door, but we are truly glad with how it is turned out. We even have some pleasant functional storage for coats and backpacks right when you walk in, thanks to the adjacent laundry closet (the kids were at school when we took this photo, but their backpacks hang on those lower hooks on the laundry closet door).

Ultimately, while we still see the value of a foyer in some homes – even simply for the “fancy factor” of having one for a pleasant dramatic first impression – we have learned that we’d personally prioritize a functional entryway with storage. For example, if given the choice between a grand open foyer or a basic front door with room for a small mudroom closet or backpack dropzone behind a door, we’d choose the latter. In our case, we chose a especially hardworking laundry closet and a pleasant open feeling in the living area instead of boxing out a formal foyer.

Do not Miss: A Laundry Room

Again, this might come as a surprise considering we worked quite hard to create a laundry room from scratch in our last house (we stole space from our unfinished attic). We even went all out with a marble backsplash and under-cabinet lighting to make it the most tricked-out laundry space we have ever owned.

In retrospect, it was certainly more laundry space than we needed. Going into it, we pictured LOVING the option to throw haphazard piles of to-be-washed items on the floor, shut the door, and let it be our little dirty secret. Or perhaps enjoying some peace-and-quiet while we folded or ironed clothes in here.

But none of that ever truly happened. Clothes never made a pit stop in here, apart from time spent in the actual washer or dryer (they were in our hampers before – and folded on the bed in our room after). Perhaps if we had more kids, busier sports schedules, or bigger wardrobes (you know Sherry loves a minimal closet) we’d have found ourselves needing this spacious secluded laundry zone at the end of a long upstairs hallway. But for our family, having the laundry so out-of-sight in fact ended up being a sticking point. We were constantly forgetting we had any laundry running because it was at the quite end of this long hallway tucked behind a door (in both former houses it was a lot closer to more bustling areas of our home like the kitchen and we rarely forgot laundry thanks to that proximity).

In many ways, our new laundry setup is ideal for our habits. It is right in the middle of the house in a closet within our kitchen/downstairs living area, which makes it extremely convenient to everyone’s bedrooms and it greatly cuts down on forgotten loads. But it is still roomy sufficient that we have a counter for pre-treating stains, a basket for wrangling too-be-washed items that might be on deck for the next load, and floor space for standing without being totally in the way.

And because it is still behind closed doors, it does not have to be kept pristine AND it cuts down on the laundry noise remarkably well. It is funny also to realize that in our first two houses, we only ever had laundry closets or nooks with a stackable washer/dryer – and never truly had a big dedicated room with cabinetry and tile and all that jazz like we had in our last house. But once again, I think it was a case of “eh, we had it and it was pleasant, but we are simply fine without it.” In short when you downsize you choose your priorities and your house cannot have everything because then it would simply be large.

Do not Miss: The Dining Room

This likely comes as no surprise to most people, considering how much “formal” dining rooms have fallen out of favor with many families. We also spoke frequently about how rarely we used this room. We typically ate family dinners at our kitchen island, so this was mostly simply a dumping ground for packages and to-be-dealt-with boxes that we occasionally cleaned up if guests were coming over.

Now we only have one indoor dining spot: the table in our kitchen (which can seat as many as 8 people if we pull it out, which we have done quite a few times). As a family, we have learned that we MUCH prefer eating at a table facing each other, so this is a big improvement from sitting on higher stools all staring out in a line at our old kitchen island.

One obvious downside to this is that it is a far cry from a “formal” setup, so if you enjoy hosting dinner parties, this might not suffice. We have never been big formal entertainers (we like a casual set-out-the-chips-and-salsa game night or an order-pizza-or-BBQ-burgers dinner party), so it was not a concern to ditch our dining room. These days if we have people over, we tend to gather outside anyways. We frequently eat out by the pool, where we have a pleasant big table with an umbrella that also seats 8.

Do not Miss: The Bonus Room

As the name implies, this room was “extra” space in our last house that we created by finishing the attic over our garage. After our kitchen, it was the biggest room in the house and it acted as a movie/TV room + playroom + crafting space. So it is funny to think such a multifunctional room falls into the “do not miss” category. But wait – there is a clear reason why we do not miss it that we will get to in a second.

Converting this unfinished space on our second floor into conditioned usable square footage was partly because it simply made sense for the house (it already had HVAC set up, so all it truly needed was drywall to be a functional room – plus we still had a full unfinished walk-up attic on the 3rd floor for storage). And making this a bonus room appealed to us because we thought a secondary living space that was designed with the kids in mind would be pleasant. You know, a lively space to corral everyone’s kids when we had people over, a room that could be messy upstairs but you simply ignore it downstairs, and a spot for cozy family movie nights.

Funnily sufficient, the reasons we liked that bonus room are the quite same reasons we enjoy our family room in this smaller house! It is an upstairs secondary living space that is designed with our kids in mind, so they can leave it messy, hang out with their friends while the adults hang out downstairs, and we can all pile in for a family movie night. Note: we count our small downstairs sitting area & kitchen as our primary living space because we all spend even more time in that eating/cooking/hangout zone downstairs than we do up here, but it is fairly close. Six rooms = you use them all, a lot.

Layout pointer: in a small house, having two large living spaces that are not right next to each other is truly what makes this house feel like it lives LARGE. We routinely have a ton of kids up here hanging out and all of the adults downstairs relaxing in the kitchen/sitting area, and thanks to one being an whole floor above the other, the kids do not hear every convo we have downstairs, and we do not hear whatever movie they are watching or game they are playing. It is strong.

Simply like our last house’s bonus room, our upstairs family room here has a TV, an art desk, and open floor space for games & crafts. Things have changed a bit now that our kids are older (we brought in that bonus room 6 years ago), so we do not experience blocks and stuffed animals all over the floor like before. But this room still sees its fair share of messes in the form of crafting explosions or board game marathons – all of which end up on the floor – which is another reason we are glad it is upstairs and out of sight. Simply like our former bonus room!

So in the end, the reason we do not miss the “bonus room” room is that we still sort of have it, simply by another name. And ours works even harder here because it also has an office space tucked into it. Speaking of which…

Missed It At First: The Office

As two people who work from home, one concern when buying this house was not having a dedicated room for a home office. In our last house we had converted the formal living room into a large workspace for both of us, so we knew that downsizing to a room without a dedicated home office was going to be a big change.

The difference felt especially challenging right after we moved, thanks to COVID throwing virtual learning onto our plates. For an whole year, all four of us ate nearly every meal at home, worked & did school five days a week from this house, etc. I mean: nothing puts a house to the test like that. And I am glad to report that we made it work, but it certainly was not the most productive time of our lives (I am sure plenty of people would say the same thing). This was the setup right after we moved. It was… not ideal.

The funny thing is that it was not all that distinct from what we had going on in our last house’s home office (those two compact chairs were the kids desk and the floating desk about four feet away was Sherry’s).

… but with kids at home all day long trying to do school while we attempted to work. Yeah, you folks know what that is like. Thankfully, that was not the setup for long – and many days in fact looked like me in the bedroom on a work call with the kids upstairs doing school (or one/both of them in their own rooms so they could focus a little more on something), and Sherry working down at the kitchen table or locked in our bedroom for a differently timed zoom meeting or conference call.

Things got much better as the room evolved and the kids went back to school, and the desk space we carved out is hands down my go-to “home office” I have ever worked from (I am typing from here right now and I have the whole room to myself!). You simply cannot beat all that natural light and the view out of that big window.

I have also switched back to a laptop so I can work outside on the upstairs deck (which I do frequently) or even on the kitchen porch, like you see below.

Meanwhile, Sherry typically works downstairs at the kitchen table or even outside by the pool with her laptop, so in 2.5 years we certainly have figured out what works for us and enjoy having such a flexible setup. It is occasionally inconvenient not having a dedicated, quiet space for work (like during the summer when the kids are home), but we never had a door on our old office, so we are no strangers to being interrupted by kids or visitors. And simply like we did in our last house – if we need a fully quiet space we simply take the laptop into our bedroom and close the door. We even have a table in there by the fireplace, so it is not a bad setup.

Do Not Miss: The Garage

Sherry and I debated where to put the garage on this list because every once in a while I think of a garage fondly, simply due to how convenient it was, but I will explain why we ultimately both voted: do not miss. Sherry has an actual hatred for our last garage and is so glad we do not have one anymore simply due to how much time we spent cleaning it out and dealing with it being full of crap all the time, so it was not a surprise that she voted that way. But my feelings were a bit more layered.

We are generally quite tidy, organized people. But for some reason, garages, sheds, attics, etc have consistently been our Kryptonite. Our Monica’s Closet, if you will. Every single time we spent days cleaning and organizing it and promised ourselves we would not let it get that bad again… it did. So the reason we do not miss a garage is simply that we are extremely grateful we are no longer in that especially frustrating loop of not keeping our promise to ourselves and spending yet another weekend cleaning the freaking garage.

Not having a garage or a garage-like space has in fact forced us into much better habits. We deal with boxes and to-be-donated stuff right away (out to the car it goes). We do not collect secondhand furniture with as much abandon (Sherry’s still a fan of the curbside find, but only if we immediately have a need/spot for it). And not having a garage has spared us from having to dedicate weekends to big garage clean-outs and, more importantly, the general shame we constantly felt about the state of our garage. It was an everyday sticking point that we never solved. And now, we have solved it by not having one.

The plain reason I quite occasionally look back on a garage fondly is that it is pleasant to have a covered enclosed space to store things like bikes and our car. Here I truly simply would like it for bike storage. Our car is out in the open and it is fully fine, but we use bikes here much more than we did in Virginia, and having a wet seat from them sitting out is not remarkable (weirdly, it is how in short everyone stores their bikes here: all lined up outside). It would be plain sufficient to make a covered little alcove for our bikes somewhere in the yard with a big piece of tin on posts or something. Even easier, I simply discovered these bike seat covers – and our seats are not wet anymore. So I think Sherry is 100% right. We cannot be trusted not to fill a garage with crap. We have unlocked whole weekends spent at the beach & our pool that otherwise would have been spent cleaning a garage if we had one. So I am certain that in the long run it is a win for us not to have one.

But lest you think we are fully cured… we DO have a small shed on the side of our house that we use for tools, yard equipment, and other miscellaneous stuff. It is about the size of a port-o-potty, so we cannot truly stuff tons of things inside… but I am only showing you the outside of it because – TRUE TO FORM! – it is right now a mess inside.

Sometimes Miss: Our Ensuite Bathroom

This may come as a surprise since we have put our plans to add a second bathroom to this house on indefinite hold (we simply do not feel squeezed for one at all yet – and embarking on an pricey reno when the current setup has worked fine for years now simply does not feel like the best use of money or time). So while we in fact do not miss having an ensuite bathroom, we simply sometimes miss THIS specific bathroom from our last house.

And I think that is mostly because we did not have much time to enjoy the wrapped up product before we moved. We gleefully wrapped up the bathroom and only got to enjoy it for about 3 months before we had a Florida zip code.

The timing certainly was not ideal, but it was a small casualty for making the more rewarding lifestyle change of downsizing to a warmer and more walkable home near the beach. Looking back at those photos, I think we simply wish we had renovated the bathroom MUCH SOONER (we lived in this house for 7 years, nearly all of which were spent with the unrenovated bathroom that you see in the before photos here).

The Trade-Offs Of Downsizing

Missing that grand bathroom of yore is a prime example of reminding ourselves that we made intentional trade-offs by downsizing. Yes, we no longer have a big fancy marble bathroom. Instead, we have this striking space to take an open-air shower in the sunlight (and an actual indoor shower too). True story: we all shower outside around 90% of the year – it is our go-to spot with the sun streaming down and a whole lotta plants.

In fact, a ton of downsizing is simply trading something for something else. We live a few blocks from the beach (we can walk there in 3 minutes!) but we all share a bathroom. We do not have a garage, but we have a big second-floor deck up in the trees. Our kitchen is about 1/3 the size of the one at our last house, but there is a grocery store, restaurants, and ice cream shops within walking distance. Our internet is not consistently reliable (seriously it is sloth-slow sometimes) but we have a pool that we can swim in year-round and a firepit for s’mores. We have a lot less square footage than we used to, but it is easier to clean and more affordable to heat & cool. You can read more about the whole process of downsizing (it was not all roses!) and that whole tradeoff concept here on our about page.

And if you’d like to read other posts we have shared about downsizing over the last 2.5 years, these are packed with info:

• How we organized our much smaller kitchen
• What furniture & home items we still have 2.5 years after downsizing
• Seven smart storage pieces that we rely on every day
• The realities of downsizing: a full report after 6 months
• A podcast about exactly how we approached downsizing our stuff
• A post all about why we chose to downsize & move to a smaller house by the beach
• A podcast about our 2019 summer of living in our smaller pink beach house & how it changed us
• A podcast interview in 2018 with Shavonda about what it is truly like to downsize
• A podcast interview with Dana Miller about downsizing (our wheels were turning for years about this concept!)

Also, if you have any questions about wall colors or where we got certain items in the photos within this post, this post has all the source info for our current house, and this post has all the source info about our last house.