Making Room for Baby

Meredith at Like Merchant Ships, posted about finding room for another baby in a small house, so I thought I'd share how we've made room for Little Bit in our small house.

Regardless of the size of our house, we'd have chosen to co-sleep, as we did with the big girls. With the girls, my dad built us a cosleeper that held a twin mattress, and that worked very well, and seemed the logical solution again. Since our room is small, the logical solution was to shift our bed slightly and build in the cosleeper to fit perfectly between our bed & the wall. This gives us a nice large bed surface for us, Little Bit, and when needed, the big girls.
Additionally, I used the space at the end of the co-sleeper to set up a "changing station" (changing mat, diapers, spray bottle to wet the cloth wipes) for quick night time diaper changes.

I used the space under the co-sleeper to store the bigger baby clothes, etc. I sorted everything (clothes, bibs, baby-proofing stuff, etc) into bins by size/age & then shoved the 12 mo bin all the way up under the head of the bed, then 6-9mo, then 3-6mo, so I can access stuff easily as I need it. At the foot of the bed I have a basket full of baby blankets & a small trash can that I use to put the wet/dirty diapers in during the night.

Closet space was something I wasn't sure about, our closet is already packed w/ our clothes & the girls' closet is also full. Then I had a brainstorm. The previous tenants had left a wire along one wall, just down from the ceiling, in our room. I'm not sure what they did with it, but we hadn't taken it down since it looked like that would require major patching the holes it would leave. So, I used it to hang the baby's cothes.
The rest of her clothes, I cleaned out one drawer of our dresser. And have a basket sitting on top of our dresser with her socks in it.

Finally, we needed a place for all the cloth diapers & such. Our bathroom has a little alcove of unused space beside the tub (w/ a door into the furnace room at the back). It occurred to me that the plastic cart we'd had in the girls' nursery might fit in that space, so we pulled it out of storage & it rolls into that space perfectly. It holds diapers, bath stuff, etc. A nail already on the wall in that space works to hold the diaper stacker mom made for the girls' nursery & the colors even coordinate well with our bathroom colors.
The take-along swing sits in front of the cart, so I have a place to put her when I shower.

I have a basket of diapering stuff in the family room for downstairs diaper changes & a bouncy seat in the family room that moves around the main floor as needed. There's also a small basket of baby toys (not needed yet, but was easier to put them there than have to find them again later) on the game shelf in the family room.

And that's how we've made room for baby.