Raising a baby in a tiny house has both challenges and benefits. When we moved to our tiny house, I was seven months pregnant and incredibly nervous about how we would fit into the space!
The Stuff
Our first challenge was fitting all of our new baby items into our home. When you add a baby to a tiny house, it’s more than just the tiny human that comes home, it’s all the stuff that comes with them! From clothes to toys to a crib — it’s easy to accumulate extra clutter with a baby, and when you live in a tiny house, the clutter is amplified.
The Space
The second challenge of living in a tiny house with a baby is that most tiny homes are open-concept or one room. This means that the baby’s space is now in your space. It can be difficult to carve out a space for the baby that is contained and quiet.
Despite these initial challenges, we’ve found that raising a baby in a tiny home is actually much easier than expected. Because of our limited square footage, we’ve found that our situation is
- Convenient: It’s easy to keep an eye on the baby — he’s never far away and rarely out of sight.
- More thoughtful: Because we don’t want clutter, we’re extra thoughtful about the toys and baby items we bring into our space.
- Saving money: We’ve made an effort to buy baby items only as we need them (rather than ahead of time) which saved us from spending money on items we didn’t need.
5 Important Habits For Raising A Baby In A Tiny House
There are five key habits that we’ve developed in order to make raising our son in a tiny house work well. This is how we’ve saved space and money (and our sanity).
1. Use Compact Versions Of Everything
If you already live in a tiny house, you know that buying compact versions of everything — from furniture to appliances to decor — is crucial. The same goes for baby products. Many baby products have compact versions for a smaller footprint.
Related Post: Lessons Learned From Our First Year of Cabin Life
One great example of a compact baby item is a mini crib. Smaller than a regular crib but still large enough to use for two years, mini cribs are an excellent space saver.
Another example of a compact baby item that we use in our home is a collapsible bathtub. We unfold this bathtub and set it on the countertop for baby’s bath time.
2. Buy Items As You Need Them
Especially with your first baby, you’re tempted to stock up on things that the baby will need for their first year, but to save space and money, only buy things as you need them.
For example, your baby won’t need a high chair until around 6 months old. Put off buying one until your baby is ready in order to save space.
Buying things as you need them will also save money. There have been countless things that we thought we needed, but when we waited a week or month to buy them our baby ended up not needing them at all.
3. Get On A Schedule
Creating a schedule for you and your baby has lots of benefits when you live in a tiny house. A schedule will help you to know when your baby will be sleeping, eating, and playing, and when certain parts of your space need to be quiet or focused on the baby.
4. Create A Baby-Proof Space
At first, you won’t need to baby proof your entire tiny house. But it will help to have a dedicated baby space that is also baby proof.
We put off baby proofing our home because it’s small, and I figured there wouldn’t be many places for our son to get into trouble. However, I quickly realized that baby proofing and having a dedicated space where your baby can play and roam, makes life a lot easier (even if the space is small)!
5. Use Spaces In Multiple Ways
Multiple use is a habit that you may already be familiar with if you’re living tiny. With a baby, it looks like creating hybrid spaces for your baby to sleep, play, and eat.
Related Post: 7 Tips For Raising Animals In A Tiny Home
Most tiny homes don’t have a dedicated space for a nursery, so you’ll want to think creatively about your space, and integrate baby’s items throughout your home.
In our tiny home this looks like:
- A nook of our living room converted to space for baby’s crib.
- A dresser in our bathroom that serves a dual purpose as a changing table.
- A clothesline in our loft that is an extension of our washing/drying process for baby’s clothes.
Raising a baby in a tiny house can be intimidating at first, but we’ve found that the benefits outweigh the challenges by far. Like with tiny living, it took some adjustment at first, but we found solutions that work for us.
Do you have any space-saving tips for baby’s first year? Drop your favorite tips, products, and money-saving hacks in the comments below.
Megan lives with her husband and son in an 800 square foot log cabin in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. In search of a simpler pace of life, Megan and her husband quit their jobs, sold what they owned, and moved across the country to their mountainside cabin. Megan blogs about her all things cabin lifestyle at The Cabin Diary.
Such photogenic photos! Is that even an appropriate use of the term, haha?
I think it’s a brilliant plan to tiny-house with a baby–it makes you see what’s really important. And the truth of the matter is: babies don’t need much!
One of my own tips might be this: there’s a huge industry based on…basically, guilting parents into believing that your kid will be so much smarter and stronger and better-suited for life…WITH THEIR STUFF (implying that you’re a bad parent if you don’t have their stuff). Which is all marketing gimmicks. Babies are content with just a handful of toys–and homemade ones work just as well, too! Dedicate a small box to baby’s toys, and make SURE they always fit in there. If they start exploding out, get rid of some.
While we live in a large house, we certainly did without most of the big items our friend used for their babies.
Co-sleeping= no crib. Cloth diapers = no diaper genie. Feeding baby on our laps = no highchair. Breastfeeding = no bottles, sterilizers, heaters, etc. We do have a friend that did elimination communication (diaper-free) with their baby so that could scale things back even further. A baby wrap or carrier, however, is a must! 🙂
(After 4 babies, we figure would could do it all again with just a wrap and some cloth diapers…)
Much peace.
I was intrigued to read your article – The thought of a baby in a tiny home made me anxious just thinking about it.
Then I read it’s 800sq/ft!! – I lived in England, my 3 bedroom house was 875sq/ft, and I had a 6ft 3 husband, a 5 year old and a rottweiler the size of a small bear!!
I guess ‘tiny’ is relative!