I also have a small house without any sizeable floor or wall space. My queen sized bed is the largest layout space I have -- that makes it rather challenging to work on queen sized quilts. When I turn it into a work surface, I cover the bed with brown kraft paper, that can give me a couple extra inches but I still don't have the floor space for much more.
Some things I have to design in sections. If your top is rectangular, the short side will often fit the long side of the bed. Or I do what I call the "bed" of the quilt first and only then look at the borders.
I label my blocks when I set them out. From my habit, I mark them with a paper square in the top left corner (outside of sewing issues) so I know what direction they go. From my habit, I label them Alpha across and Numbers down. With a diagonal setting it is slightly more complicated. The scan below is the layout of my current project -- hope it helps.
I found this pre-sized grid that fit my currently project pretty well -- you can also do a custom layout.
https://www.incompetech.com/graphpap...ull%20Grid.pdf