A Bed in the Living Room?

We are a family of 5 living in a two bedroom home. Not only is in two bedrooms, but we have a total of four rooms, not including closets. Those rooms include the living room/kitchen, the bedrooms and the bathroom (the porch is outdoors and the shed is an unfinished room without air conditioning). Do you see my dilemma?

In addition to the house being small, the bedrooms are also pretty small. I can’t imagine fitting three kids into one of our bedrooms. It’s already a tight enough squeeze with a twin bed and a toddler bed in one room.
So with that in mind, Philip and I discussed what would be best to make this house work for us. Of course I dream of owning a house one day, but with no solid income that is not in our near future. So instead of day dreaming of bigger spaces and more rooms, our goal is to come up with a solution that will work for us.
That is where the bed in the living room comes into the picture. Our plan is to move our bed out of our bedroom, giving our room to Eliana and Isabelle and leaving Elijah with his very own bedroom.

I used floorplanner.com to create this model of the current state of our living room. This isn’t counting for our side tables, an extra chair, high chair, car seat, entryway bench, and shoe basket but you get the general idea.
After messing with a few layouts, I landed on this configuration. It seems to be the most functional and best looking for what we need.
I don’t think it could work without an EXPEDIT bookcase from IKEA. Otherwise, you’d walk in the front door and BAM, bed in your face. Not exactly the “feel” I’m going for. The bookcase would act as a wall without making it feeling too closed in. It would also allow light to pass through the back window into the “sitting” area.
My plan is to move the children’s table and our current tv “stand” into the bedroom, allowing us to fit a legitimate dining room table in the living room. Awesome!
As far as things that belong in a proper bedroom, like clothes, we would keep those in our current bedroom closet. We would just need to bring out our sleeping clothes before we lay the kids down for bed. Everything else we need to get ready for bed in housed in the bathroom. And for matters such as privacy, we would just tell the children to not come out of their bedrooms until a certain time in the morning or until we come and get them, unless they need to use the bathroom, which doesn’t require them to come into the living area. That may be a hard concept for Eliana to grasp, but we can usually hear her coming thanks to her signature door slamming and screaming.
So what do you think? Are we absolutely off our rockers for considering moving our bed to the living room? Well, maybe we are.

Update! We did it, we moved our bed to the living room and it’s actually working out pretty nicely.

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4 Comments

  1. Stay in the bedroom, kick the kids into the living room, at least you will have a door you can lock and some privacy… that's what I think anyways;)

  2. I think its a good idea. I want to try this when our child is older if we are still in this one room apartment as we are trying to save and cant afford a bigger place anytime soon

  3. If your kids are little I say why not but your husband and you need privacy too. Why not build bunks and make one room just for sleeping for the kids and make an play room where you want to put your bed in the living room.

  4. That's a great idea, I'd love to build custom bunk beds one day. We have been sleeping in the living room for some time now and it is actually working out great. You can see pictures here: http://www.turningithome.com/2013/10/a-bed-in-our-living-room.html

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