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What do you really need your house to be?

The point of this exercise is to identify how you live and then tailor your home to accommodate your life, rather than assuming that every house should have the same set of rooms.

Take a look at your existing home. Make a list of all of the rooms, including the approximate square footage of each space. Under each room name, list what you do there. Next to each activity, list who does it and how often it happens. Finally, rewrite the list of rooms in order of most to least used.

This exercise often offers surprises. In many homes, the largest rooms (such as formal living and dining rooms) are the rooms which are used least often. If this is true for you, it may be time to give some thought to the way you use these rooms. It is possible that a new piece of furniture or a different arrangement of the items in the room will make that room much more useful. For example, adding an overstuffed chair with an ottoman to a formal living room might entice you to spend a half hour a day there with a good book. On the other hand, it might make sense to completely change the function of a room if it is used only once or twice a year. Does it make sense to dust that dining room table every week? What would happen if you moved the table and chairs out and used the room as a music room or art studio?

(Adapted from The Not So Big House by Sarah Susanka, 1998)