Well, hello there and welcome back. My name is Stephanie Safarian and you were listening to episode 185 of the Sustainable Minimalist Podcast.

On today's show, we are discussing why living small is the epitome of both eco-friendliness and minimalism.

Bigger is best, right, or so we're told.

But if you have pressed play on a minimalist podcast, it likely comes as no surprise to you that bigger homes in particular often equate to more stuff, more stress, and more headaches.

It's a real conundrum because while many of us revere space,

there are countless benefits to be reaped

when we live in smaller homes. On today's show I am speaking with

Laura Fenton. Laura is the author of The Little Book of Living Small. You'll hear

Laura describe her home in our interview today,

but it's important for me to note at the outset

that we're not discussing tiny homes today.

Instead, we are discussing an incremental approach to intentionally choosing smaller

in a home that's maybe fewer square feet than you can afford perhaps. Laura is here to outline the benefits

she experiences every single day from living in a smaller space with her husband and son.

Laura I'm so excited to have you on. How are you? I am fantastic. Thank you for having me on. Well let's start by you

introducing yourself. Tell my listeners who you are, what you do, and more specifically as it relates to our conversation today, where you live.

I am the author of the Little Book of Living Small, and I'm a mom to a five and a half year old boy and I have spent my whole

career writing and specifically writing about Holmes before writing my book I was the lifestyle editor at Parents magazine for six years.

So I've written a lot about family homes in particular and today I'm a freelance writer

contributing to magazines like Real Simple and I'm a contributing editor at Food 52 and I'm also

working on a second book so that's my professional life and then in my personal life, my husband and my son and I live in Jackson Heights, Queens,

in New York City. We live in a six hundred and ninety square foot apartment and we are in a building from

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