I hadn’t really considered the perks of apartment living for our first year of having a baby. It kind of just “happened to us.” I wasn’t ready to live in a house and pay a mortgage, and I happened to be pregnant, so we wound up committing to a year of living in our two-bedroom apartment with our baby on the way.

What I found out is that apartments are great for raising a baby. There are lots of benefits and advantages that you can’t get when you live in a stand-alone house. In this list, read about my experience with the upsides to an apartment lifestyle when your baby comes. You might learn a thing or two!

Everything is on the “same floor”

Unless you live in a duplex or a multi-level apartment, chances are that your apartment is one floor in total, like all of ours have been.

From laundry to the location of the fridge, my friends in houses that were two and three floors were jealous of me. “Wow, that must be convenient, to have the fridge and kitchen sink on the same floor as the baby’s room,” they’d say.

And yes, it was: while my friends had to climb one or two flights of steps to rinse a bottle in the middle of the night, and create diaper changing stations on every floor of the house, I didn’t have to. My kitchen was right off the living room, and our nursery was right next to that, as well as the laundry room!

You’ll get creative with space and only keep important stuff

One reason we moved to the suburbs was that our suburban apartment in a complex had more square footage than our 1-bedroom apartment in NYC. Nevertheless, the space got eaten up really fast once we had a baby, and had things like the changing table, a baby swing, baby bouncer, bassinet and play mat, kind of inserted into all of the rooms we had previously led our pre-child adult lives in.

We got creative, which felt good: eventually, I put the Mamaroo bouncer in our bedroom, so that when I folded laundry, our baby could hang out and swing around!

And we got a bigger swing for the nursery, but after a while, we realized we should give it away on Buy Nothing because it wasn’t quite useful enough. Paring down helped me invent a minimalist baby nursery.

The bottom line is that when living in apartment, we kept what was important, and got rid of (or gave away) things that weren’t serving us, or took up space with no use. It felt GOOD to only hold on to the things we wanted and needed, and to keep our space free of junk.

(Living in a house with a basement, it’s tons easier to hold onto everything and develop a useless collection of baby stuff!)

Great ways to meet other families

I was very lucky (this is a theme here) in that the general manager of our building at the time when we were living in the complex was VERY friendly and thoughtful. Within weeks of having our daughter, the GM offered to introduce me to another woman who had a baby 3 months older.

I couldn’t believe my good fortune: a new mom friend living almost under the same roof! I got in touch with her, and we started chatting about all the hot baby topics like sleep, eating, getting out and what activities to do.

I invited her to the New Babies Meetup, telling her it was the best way to make new mom friends.

Aside from this one mom my age in particular, I had already become friendly with other families on other floors. One had an 8-year-old, and one family had a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old. Within time, I met three other couples who’d be giving birth in coming months, and eventually, our baby had other “baby friends” within the building.

Social atmosphere in common spaces

Having a baby and not having to leave home to go to the pool was amazing. Really, it was the highlight of my summer after the really long winter with a newborn. By the time summer came around, our daughter was 6 months old and we were ready to dip our feet in the pool and wave hi to all the other families.

We made friends with older neighbors, got to see lots of dogs and stayed highly social in one of the most unique times of my life: maternity leave. This was so important to me, because I thrive off of social atmospheres, and apartment living was the icing on the cake.

I never would’ve had a perk like this if I were living in a house (unless it was maybe a townhouse in a community or a new home in one of those developments with a pool and club house, in Florida).

You’re never far from the baby

Now that we live in a house, I realize how convenient it was for the baby to be only a few feet away when I need to do something, or anything. Now, if I have to grab my laptop, I have to make sure she’s secured in the high chair downstairs, or in the Skip Hop activity center, so that she doesn’t climb up the stairs while I’ve turned my head.

There weren’t any huge ways for her to get in trouble while we were living in the apartment. Plus, she was almost always in our line of vision, thanks to a pretty open floor plan. We loved that our open kitchen let us see straight to her play mat where she’d sit and babble with her toys.

Or, when she was younger, we’d put her in a BabyBjorn bouncer seat and walk away for a quick second because we’d never be far.

In a house now, there are lots of options to be far from the baby. There are different floors, lots of doorways, an entire flight of steps, a basement, the garage and the outdoors. There are lots of places to be.

You may not even need baby gates

It’s true: we didn’t even need to consider baby gates when we had an apartment. We could’ve put up a play pen like lots of our friends did, but our baby was a late crawler, and turned out to be a very “polite” crawler that was not so fast. We didn’t buy a single baby gate until we moved to the house.

We felt that the doors to the rooms that had them (bedroom sand bathrooms, along with the laundry room) was plenty for controlling a crawler’s movement in an apartment. And lucky for us, we didn’t even have any sunken rooms with one step down, or anything like that. It was just a flat apartment, which made it very easy to have a young baby.

Close-by amenities

I’ll say this for myself in our very particular situation: it was highly convenient for me to have access to the gym on the main floor of our building, where I could go for some steps on the treadmill or to do a yoga session on the floor while our baby was napping.

Had we lived in a house, I would’ve been doing things like that, but never leaving “home.”

Using the building’s spaces for get-togethers

Again, this was unique to our building, but by living in a massive apartment complex with a lot of built-in spaces, I was always first to make great use of the building’s club room.

In fact, if you’ve read my other parenting articles and read all about the New Babies Meetup that I first attended and then later wound up hosting, the story is that I eventually hosted the whole meeting in our building’s club room!

I, and everyone else, considered how lucky we all were that in the heat of summer and on days when the air quality was bad, we had a safe, comfortable and baby-friendly space where 12 moms and dads could come with their infants under 1 and spread out, change diapers, play on mats and use the fridge for bottles.

It was lucky, and it was an awesome perk of living in an apartment building and utilizing the spaces I had access to while I had a baby.

Less home means less to take care of

We lived in an apartment with our baby until she was 15 months old, and that was when we moved to our first house. Honestly, I appreciated our apartment SO much while we lived in it with our little one. Having less square footage meant less cleaning, less upkeep, fewer needs for repairs and generally less to worry about.

On the other hand, moving into a house means lawn care, more needs for repairs, an entire flight of steps, old fixtures to replace, plumbing issues, more rugs to vacuum, more bathrooms to clean and more insects. We have to do all this, while juggling the demands of our toddler.

Living in an apartment was simpler: given, we still had to clean the kitchen, and our two bathrooms, but I never had to drag a vacuum up two flights of stairs from the basement and I rarely misplaced things. Of course, there are upsides to having a house with a baby or a toddler, but I’ll stand by the simplicity of apartment living with a little one.

You may even save money

We ran a lot of numbers, facts and figures, and if we wanted to save money with a baby, renting an apartment was the way to go. With the rising costs of construction, renovation, upkeep and repairs, an apartment proved a smart way for us to live.

Of course, you may own your apartment: you may pay a mortgage and an HOA. Still, chances are that you don’t need to set aside $20K every year for a “big repair” like a broken heating system, a new roof or something major.

This helps with keeping costs down while you are burdened with things like daycare, a nanny, preschool and all the regular costs of having a baby, like diapers and wipes. It’s why I think living in an apartment is a great lifestyle benefit when you are living with a baby.