This Tiny House Has a Genius Solve for Hacking More Kitchen Space
Tiny houses and other super compact homes don’t just provide style inspiration; they should be mined for their smart small space living solutions, too. For example, I found ideas in the tidy Airstream home known as the Tin Can Homestead. Plenty of organizing lessons can be discovered in this incredibly livable 160-square-foot tiny house. And most recently, I came across a genius solve from a tiny house in Hawaii.
Zeena Fontanilla and her husband Shane’s tiny house is a practically spacious 350 square feet. Off-grid, it’s currently nestled in a pasture in Hawaii, where nature’s right outside the door. In her house tour with Apartment Therapy, Zeena shared one of the most important things they wanted their home to represent: “Connection to each other, to the outdoors, and even our relationship with natural resources, which we realized we took for granted, daily.”
“If you’re living in a tiny space, spare yourself the headache and only move in the things that bring you joy.”
But as parents to a growing toddler—and both lovers of having friends over and entertaining—the couple’s tiny house had to function for their family’s needs, too. Marie Kondo would love this smart takeaway from Zeena’s survey answers: “If you’re living in a tiny space, spare yourself the headache and only move in the things that bring you joy.” Sage advice for any size home. Also a good idea to steal from Zeena’s tiny house tour? What she calls a tiny kitchen hack that anyone could use:
“Don’t waste your time with cabinet doors but install base cabinet drawers,” explains Zeena. “This will instantly increase your storage and make your life 10 times easier when you’re grabbing that item in the back of the cabinet.”
How did base cabinet doors ever become the norm? As seen in the piece, Why You Should Choose Drawers Over Cabinets in Your Kitchen, the reasons to go for drawers over doors really pile up. In fact, the very first pro on the list echoes Zeena’s reasoning entirely: Ease of Access.
“A typical lower cabinet is two feet deep, which, with a doored cabinet, means that it’s easy for stuff to get lost in the dark netherworld at the back of the cabinet,” writes Nancy Mitchell. “And who wants to pull out everything they own just to get to that one pot? Drawers neatly solve this problem, making even objects in the very back of the drawer easy to access.”
Need still more proof that base cabinet drawers could change your kitchen for the better? Professional organizer Kristen Ziegler designed her IKEA kitchen herself, and it’s full of drawer storage options. I love that even the base cabinets that look like they’re just doors with shelves are actually, in fact, pull-out drawers.
What do you think about the drawers versus doors debate?