Living In A Compact Material World

As an extension to my Moving to NYC post, my wife and I have been figuring out how to "live smaller".  Since our space has substantially been reduced, we have been forced to find inventive ways to fit our stuff into a smaller space and still make it look hip.

There are plenty of websites out there all about how to create an apartment space that is efficient such as Apartment Therapy, so I won't bother trying to reiterate those.  I do however want to point out some amazing inspiration that I wouldn't have thought of, and which seems to get it roots from an older time.

One example is the "trunk", a large suitcase type thing with a hinged top that contains basically collections of stuff.  Is the kind of thing you think of from Harry Potter:

Or perhaps the walking bad tempered "Luggage" from Terry Pratchett novels:

Either way, its a bit from an "older time" and yet they are sold all over the place, and we are actually thinking of getting one.  This might be simply my own "asymmetric information" moment, and I just need to get out more.  OR it might people are returning to smaller living spaces and are beginning to adopt similar means to storing belongings because of necessity.

Returning to alternative methods isn't limited to storage either (which one way or another hasn't changed THAT much in the past hundred years I don't think).  It also is to do with cleaning...

In California, we take for granted that washing machines are close at hand.  Our old apartment had a washer drier right outside the apartment.  This unit was shared by the other 5 units in the complex.  Many apartments didn't have any washer/drier access and so there were of course laundry mats that we used if a single washer/drier wasn't enough, or was already taken by another resident.  Move to NYC.  Now the norm seems to be "send it out".  Lots of things are delivered here, such as groceries, and laundry, you can usually get pickup/dropoff service form laundries that are all over the place.

My suspicion is that what I am witnessing is not unique to the NYC, but more likely is a '"burbs to city" change.  But at any rate, my wife saw this and I thought it was AWESOME:

Its a manual washing machine that you hand spin, after adding soap and a bit of water.  In about 4 minutes, you've done an albeit small load of laundry, but perfect for hand wash knits or other items that require delicacy.  It instantly reminded me of this:

As far as I know, nobody has used this for actual washing in an awfully long time.  A quick google search only shows these being used as musical instruments.  Although this manual way of doing laundry wasn't because people were in small spaces so much as the washing machine hadn't been invented, but still.  Interesting to note people are not simply looking for whizz bang technology to solve their problems.

In retrospect, given my last couple of posts, perhaps I should have called this blog "Suburban Dude and his wife move to the Big City".