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A Small Home in NYC, Part 5: Furniture for a Small Home

Choosing furniture is a process that reflects your need for utility, comfort and design. It is an especially important consideration when trying to create a small home in New York. Rooms are tiny, often shared, and the quality of affordable furniture has declined significantly over the last 50 years. How do you find the right mix of utility, comfort and design, and do you really need all that furniture?

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A Small Home in NYC, Part 4: A Sample NYC Family Budget

Part 4 of the series, "A Small Home in NYC." Offering a sample family budget is difficult because people have very different lifestyles and priorities, but I thought it might be helpful to share our budget, with some modifications, and explain how it was different when we lived in Nashville, Tennessee. It's shockingly similar except for a few areas like housing and transportation.

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A Small Home in NYC, Part 3: Living the Good Life?

Part 3 of the series, "A Small Home in NYC." Helen and Scott Nearing were huge influences on me as a young adult. My father originally turned me on to their book "Living The Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World" which was an important catalyst for the original back to the Earth movement of the mid-20th century. They migtht have lived a "good life," but was it real or attainable for ordinary people without the backing of trust funds? Was the Nearing's back to the woods approach mostly sentimental escapism?

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A Small Home in NYC, Part 2: Let's Get Small!

Part 2 of the series, "A Small Home in NYC." I delve into the motiviations for living small and how we got started. We lived very minimally compared to most families, but we still had a house in Nashville, Tennessee filled with things that we didn't need or ever use. The first step was to get rid of everything that would not fit into a small PODS container for our move to NYC.

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