Flex Space
Executive summary: I refer to our home as a “2.5-bedroom” condo, thanks to this little space. It’s much smaller than a regular bedroom, but it’s enough to fit a full or queen-sized bed, which is all this minimalist really needs!
Much of Stanford faculty housing (which this condo is) runs on a lottery system. There is a limited inventory of single-family homes and 3-bedroom condos, so the school puts them on a lottery. Every time the housing office lists a new home for sale, the interested faculty submit their applications and wait to hear who got lucky enough to land at the top of the list. We did this a few times, to no avail. If I had my heart set on a larger home, we could wait for more listings to come up and try the lottery again and again. There’s no saying how long it would be before we got lucky enough to nab a place. But I’m happy with a smaller home, and I didn’t feel like waiting on the lottery for potentially years, so we kept our eyes peeled for 2-bedroom condos, which are on a first-come-first-served basis. Our hypervigilance paid off: when the posting for our place went up, we saw it within minutes, grabbed the toddler and showed up at the door, and signed the contract within an hour of the listing going live! We got lucky in our own way with this condo: for many months, I had assumed that we would be in one of the smaller 2br units, just because they are the most plentiful in this complex. I had it all planned out with hubby and me squeezing a full-sized bed into the walk-in-closet while giving the kids their own bedrooms. But the unit that we ended up getting has an extra flex space (which is called a “study” in the floor plan) that I can convert into a tiny third bedroom. Not only can it fit a full or queen-sized bed, but there’s actually a sliver of space for us to even walk around the bed! Amazing!
This flex space is situated off the entryway and separated from the living area by a long pony wall. The question was how to close off the doorway and the half-height wall within the stringent restrictions that Stanford imposes on faculty housing. We’re not allowed to add any doors inside the unit, so I went with a thicker curtain on a tension rod to cover the doorway. I didn’t want the room to be draped all over with curtains, so I needed another solution for the 8’-wide opening in the pony wall. I decided that we could install plantation shutters, which can be open during the day to let in light and closed at night to provide privacy. I got another set of plantation shutters for the room too, to cover the inoperable window that looks into the condo’s common walkway, but they mostly stay shut because that window provides no natural light anyway. Between the two sets of custom shutters and the installation, I paid $3k, but I consider that a steal compared to buying a true 3-bedroom condo (assuming we somehow eventually won the lottery). Even the difference in property tax alone would cover the $3k in a couple years.
Closing off the flex space with plantation shutters transforms our 2-bedroom condo into a 3ish-bedroom condo
The one issue with the doorway curtain and plantation shutters is that they aren’t good at blocking out noise. In this family, we are very accustomed to being considerate of each other (I mean, we were living in a 1-br apartment before), so I don’t find it to be a problem. For now, this is a guest room for the grandparents, and apart from their snoring, we aren’t disturbing each other, haha. But when hubby and I make this our bedroom in the future (once the kids each get their own room), we will have to make sure that our sleeping schedules are coordinated. Given that’s 5-10 years out, there’s no point in worrying about it now, as I can’t even imagine what our lives will be like then!
Folding mattress: Milliard | Folding bedframe: Walmart | Sheets: Nautica | Bedspread: Amazon | Stools: IKEA | Rug: Costco | Sunburst mirror: Amazon
I wanted to maintain flexibility in this room while it’s not being occupied every day. So I got a full-sized folding bedframe and mattress, which we can tuck away if we ever want to use this room for something else (e.g., a play room or a nap room for our friends’ kids if we have them over). I may decorate it more fully when this becomes our permanent bedroom, but I’m keeping my options open at the moment style-wise. The other challenge with this room is that it's quite dark. Like I said, the one window doesn’t provide any natural light, so the room depends on light from the living room windows, which are relatively far away. That’s why I don’t plan on making this one of the kid’s bedrooms in the future – in my personal experience, teenagers like to hang out in their bedrooms for privacy, and I want them to have natural light during the day. Meanwhile, hubby and I don’t really spend any time in our bedroom before bedtime, so it’s ok for it to be dark. That’s the thought at least, but like I said, we’ll see where everything stands in a few years and make a final decision then.