Smaller house close to city can free time

While some homeowners sacrifice — making do in a smaller home that is more convenient to work rather than moving to a larger house in a more distant suburb — others literally make do by adding space and value to a smaller home.

Steeper prices, traffic, friends and community involvement all factor into the decision when families consider trading up from a smaller starter home. The decision between making day-to-day life work in a given space or devising a plan to upgrade to a larger space can be a difficult one.

Some choose to stay in their small home and face the daily challenges it brings rather than move to the outer suburbs. Increased home values might make a move to a larger home possible, but the trade-off often is a much longer commute and less time to spend with the children.

Tom and Alina Copeland rented a one-bedroom apartment in Arlington after they got married. In December 1999, they bought a 1,985-square-foot end-unit town home in Annandale. Mrs. Copeland was pregnant with their first child when they moved.

“When we moved in, it was so much space. We had rooms we never went into,” Mr. Copeland says. “It was such a huge house after a one-bedroom apartment. Surely, we could never fill all this space. But lo and behold, we have.”

The Copelands now have five children. The oldest is 51/2. Two of the children sleep in one bedroom; three share another in the three-bedroom home.

They have had to be creative about space. Mr. Copeland uses the laundry room for his home office. He often works there in the morning before heading to work in Herndon.

Mrs. Copeland runs her daily laundry load after he leaves for his job.

The Copelands say they are not quite ready to move to the outer suburbs just yet, although they could likely sell their house for around $450,000 and make the move.

What keeps them in Annandale? They say it is their involvement in their Alexandria church and good friends who live less than 20 minutes away. It is convenient to major highways and shopping, too.

To complicate matters, Mrs. Copeland has begun home-schooling the older children, and her Romanian parents visit each summer for at least six weeks.

“One thing that we’ve found with home-schooling is that you use every square inch of your home because the children are home all day long,” Mrs. Copeland says. “We have to be a little bit creative with that. Our basement — which had been used as a family room and a guest bedroom — now it has also become a school room.”

“When we have visitors for longer than a week, then it becomes harder,” Mrs. Copeland says. “We’re waiting for a little bit of a push to think about something bigger. Probably if we found out we were expecting another baby, that would be the type of push we’d need.”

The Copelands say they are open to having more children.

Fortunately, Mr. Copeland has flexible work hours so his commute to Herndon isn’t so bad. The couple predicts that if they moved farther out, he would have to spend about 11/2 hours on the road for work.

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