Making This One Change Freed Up So Much Space in My Bedroom

Know the thing that you’re constantly bumping into at your house? Come on, you know you have one. Well, if you live in a small space, you probably do. For me, it was the tiny stand that my bedroom television’s cable box was on. There’s not much of a walkway between my bed and the wall, but we wanted a TV in there and had to have the cable box because, well, local sports. So with the box came the need for a tiny table to hold it. Honestly, what I had going on in there was more of a cube really, part of a Target nesting set I had since my first college apartment. The piece was not all that deep but projected just enough to get in my way. All the time. And I bruise easily. So when my boyfriend suggested a projector-and-cutting-the-cord combo, I was all ears. No cable box would mean no table. And a projector meant no physical television, which, though we had a wall-mounted flat screen at that time, still took up a decent amount of wall space and wasn’t exactly flush to the wall. Every square inch counts in an apartment, right?

To be clear, a really good projector can cost as much as a television, even though it’s a smaller piece of equipment, so to speak. But you definitely get more bang for your buck, at least size and resolution-wise with a projector. After buying a big-screen for our living room last Black Friday, we weren’t exactly in the market to drop another $500 plus on something for the bedroom. So we started researching and found this 720p Simplebeam projector on Amazon for $100. Not top of the line 4K resolution and not the smallest, sleekest model either, but something totally serviceable for the cost. Sidenote: There’s a lot that goes into buying a projector—type, resolution, throw ratio, light source, brightness, etc. So if you want more information on making this decision, this guide can help you. If upgrading is an option in the future, we’d probably go higher res and better contrast ratio, but that’s not in the cards right now. So at any rate, we mounted our projector on a shelf above our bed, using vertical space we’d never utilize otherwise. Again, not for the faint of heart or if you’re not totally secure in your handy skills. But for us, so far, so good.

Honestly, I don’t know why we didn’t do this sooner. For $100, we now have an eight-foot screen and don’t even have to share it with annoying drunk people at a bar. With the help of a Chromecast, we can watch Netflix, Hulu, YouTube—literally all the things. Our walls are white so we didn’t need a drop-down or fixed screen to have a decent picture. And that meant one less thing to buy, install and take up visual space in our room. We even used a Logitech Harmony Hub to Alexa-enable our device, which is super convenient. So what if our off-brand projector makes a weird sing-songy noise when it comes on and its fan hums like an old school classroom model. The real payoff is the newfound floor space. We finally let go of that pesky table and got an actual walkway between our bedroom door and bathroom in return. There really wasn’t room for a piece of furniture there in the first place. And I haven’t had a shin bruise since.