The ceiling in my first apartment was 9 feet high, and for two full years I used approximately none of the top 3 feet of it. That’s the thing nobody tells you about small apartments — you’re not actually short on square footage as often as you think you are. You’re short on floor footage,…
My stepstool lives inside my staircase. Not next to it — inside it. The apartment I rented in Providence had these boxy wooden stairs up to a lofted bedroom, and I noticed one of the risers had a seam that didn’t quite match the others. Turned out the previous tenant had cut a little door…

I used to keep my winter coats in my oven. Not because I’m insane — because my first apartment in Chicago was 375 square feet, had zero coat closet, and I genuinely could not find anywhere else to put four coats between October and April. I finally bought a $40 wall-mounted rack from a hardware…