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We live in a two bedroom, one bathroom rental that is somewhere between 700 and 800 square feet. We like small space living and think it'll be perfectly sufficient for the two of us and the baby girl who will be joining us in May.

We love living right in the middle of the city and having just about everything we could want within walking distance. We don't have a parking space, but street parking is easy in our neighborhood so it's not much of a concern. We do have a hookup for a washer and dryer and are REALLY looking forward to installing those before baby arrives. It's a small space to keep clean, which is fantastic, and it forces us not to be packrats, which is...not my forte but definitely something I am getting better at (admittedly we do have a small storage unit). Probably the biggest pro for us is that because we are subleasing from family members who have a multi-unit lease in the building, our rent is significantly below market due to rent control, so it enables us to save a lot more money than we would be able to otherwise.

There are a lot of cons, but most of them are random things related to our specific situation, not small space living in general. We wind up fixing a lot of things that a landlord would normally be responsible, because it's almost impossible to get our landlord to do anything for us due to the aforementioned well below market rent. The lease extends back to the early 1970s, so there haven't been any improvements whatsoever made during that time - all our fixtures are ancient, the paint was peeling off the walls in sheets when we moved in, things like that. We're very limited in our furniture purchases because the stairwell is too narrow to move in anything large, and there are a lot of (beautiful but odd) built-ins that limit how we can set up the furniture that does fit. We don't have any outdoor space at all - not even a patch of grass. The pilot in the heater burns out almost as soon as it's lit, and I'm not convinced the back stairwell would survive an earthquake.

We're definitely happy there for now, and hope to stay for a couple more years, but once we are ready to have a second child, we'll probably look for something more in the 1500-1800 square foot range, which will likely entail leaving the Bay Area, since we could never afford that in SF and we aren't big on the suburbs.

We've been in the same two bedroom, 1 bath apartment, less than 900 sf for the last 7 years. It was plenty big when it was just the two of us, then along came my husband's aunt after a year of marriage, then kid 1, then kid 2, then kid 3. So yes, there's six of us here. It's clean but messy. Whenever my sister in law visits, she starts cleaning and throwing stuff away. =P We do rent a garage downstairs for storage at $100/month. My husband is a hoarder. Shared laundry is $1.50/wash and $1.25 to dry. We've had chances to upgrade to a three bedroom but we rather save the money. Current market rental rate for a 2 bedroom is around $1700-$2200. Current market price for single family 3 bedroom/1 bath can range from low end of $650K up to $900K. I keep telling myself, eventually, we'll move out or purchase a house when the eldest gets bigger. We'll see how long that take us!