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I'm genuinely curious - how did you manage 1500 sq ft with two kids? I've seen various outlets that state most people need roughly 450 sq ft, and we currently h

• tathougies 8y ago
  In 1950, the average space per person was 259 sq ft. People in the 1950s turned out just fine. The larger and larger homes we are seeing today while witnessing the ever declining family size are the result of unadulterated greed, pure and simple. Source: https://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/the-righteous-small-house-challenging-house-size-and-the-irresponsible-american-dream https://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/the-righteous-small-house...
  • jimmaswell 8y ago
    The rich of back then had big houses too. It's not some increase in greed, just an increase in accessibility. I don't see the need to ascribe negative traits like greed to wanting more space in any case.
    • tathougies 8y ago
      The rich back then were greedy, just as the rich are today. Greed in 1950 is as bad as greed today. Arguing that there are more greedy people does not exonerate anyone. It's not like there being more greedy people somehow lessens the amount of greed experienced by each one. In other words, greed is not a zero-sum game. And yes, greed is a negative trait when your greed means wasting things that you objectively do not need.
      • jimmaswell 8y ago
        You objectively do not need to be wasting electricity web browsing either. I don't buy that argument.
        • tathougies 8y ago
          I pointed out that people did just as well with less space. This is evidence they do not need more space, and that it is wasteful to use more space for fewer people. My job requires web browsing, and insofar as my employment is good for society, I'm not convinced it's at the same level of utility. Also, no one asked me in incredulity how I could get by with less electricity.
  • ryandrake 8y ago
    I just want to know what on earth people are filling these enormous 2000+ sq.ft houses with! 4 bedrooms, 3 bathrooms? Even if you have 4 people in your family, do they all need separate rooms, and what is the probability that they all need to pee at the exact same time?
    • dragonwriter 8y ago
      > Even if you have 4 people in your family, do they all need separate rooms “Need” is a flexible term; it's clearly possible for people to survive without any rooms. But, yes, there's plenty of reason to believe that there are benefits to having a private space. But most likely a four-person family with a 4-bedroom house has two adults sharing the master bedroom, two children with their own rooms, and a guest room and/or office. > and what is the probability that they all need to pee at the exact same time? Hopefully, close to zero, since your hypothetical still has fewer bathrooms than people. But multiple restrooms. But, it's actually quite likely that multiple people will be using bathrooms for either elimination or bathing at the same time, particularly in the mornings. (It's also somewhat likely when entertaining, which is one of the reasons people want large houses.)
• scrumper 8y ago
  I have 1,500 for a family of 4 and it's fine. The youngest's bedroom isn't all that big but it's hardly a cell. The layout is crap, it's a 1950s split so that 1,500 square feet is divided over 3 staggered levels. One room, half the bottom floor, is as big as a one car garage and is just my office. The main floor is open living room and dining room, with a separate kitchen, then 3 beds and two bathrooms upstairs. We have never noticed feeling cramped, though I would definitely enjoy the extra space in my friends' larger houses. In our case we bought on the edge of a park a five minute walk to every school my kids will need until college. So we can suck it up. (And if it gets too cramped, we'll build another floor.) It's only bad when the kids go nuts and spread their mess out over the ground floor. You just have to learn to be tidy!
• zwieback 8y ago
  We have a little more than 1500 but not much more. Our two girls had to share a bedroom and they grumbled a little but we have a policy to not negotiate with our kids and in the end it wasn't a problem and they learned to get along. Now they are almost out of the house and we don't have a large empty home to deal with. I also have a one-car detached garage with no space for a car. If there's one thing I could change it's more space for storage and a shop. On the other hand it forces us to not accumulate too much junk.
• nfg 8y ago
  This is amazing to me, where I live (suburbs of Dublin in Ireland) an average 3 bed family home is 100sqm (~1000sqft), I would consider a 150sqm home (~1500sqft) to be quite large, so the idea that it’s a size that you might just about manage with 2 kids is sort of horrifying.
• burlesona 8y ago
  I have about 1200 sqft (2bd 2 ba) for a family of 5 and it works. The kids are young and share a big room, and they love it. The only thing that's cramped is that we don't have a place for guests to stay with us, which I'd change if I could. I do think we'll want to upsize to get a full guest room and maybe another half-bath, a 4bd would probably be perfect for us. But there's no urgency to move, bc. we have a good deal and it's actually quite comfortable - and very low maintenance. Living in a smaller space you just learn to be efficient and not to collect junk. We have plenty of toys / things / whatever, it's not like we're zen minimalists, we just don't keep very much "stuff" that we don't use regularly. That's actually really nice. We know a lot of families in the city that live in even smaller spaces. I think my takeaway from this is you can make whatever work, you just adapt to the space you have. I'm not saying it's better necessarily, it just really depends on all the other variables in your situation. For my family the nice neighborhood, very short commute, and affordable / low maintenance space is a win. Other people would choose differently.
  • acconrad 8y ago
    > The kids are young and share a big room How will that scale when they are teenagers? Especially if mixed-sexes, I can foresee this being difficult, which I think is part of the reason my wife and I are looking at separate bedrooms.
• 20years 8y ago
  We have a 1500 sq ft house with 2 kids. We have 3 bedrooms so each kid has their own room. We also have 2 added sunrooms off each end of the house, one of which I use for my office. Part of our garage has also been converted into a gaming area for my son and his friends. We don't want anything bigger. It really is the perfect size for our family. We all have our own space when we need it but still close enough so we aren't totally alienated from each other.
  • checkyoursudo 8y ago
    This is another thing I would do in any future house: build a sunroom if it didn't already have one. Our current and previous house have them, and the first house that I love did not. That house with a sunroom would have been amazing. Sunrooms are probably my favorite part of a house now.
• checkyoursudo 8y ago
  I would certainly be ok with an 1800 sqft house if it was the right house. For me, 2200 is probably pushing the upper limits of what I would like, but you know sometimes you just have to compromise. The layout of the 1500 was amazing. It was a story and a half, 3 main floor bedrooms, with the upper story usable as anything, including another bedroom if desired. The main floor bedrooms are small, but we tend to spend as little time as possible in them. No TVs. No computers. No school work. Not much play, unless wanting to be alone. Edit: One of the main floor bedrooms was super small, like only really a nursery/baby room, though still fine for a little kid. The kitchen was small but super usable. The living room was nice sized, long and narrow, like 25' x 10' if I recall. That meant you could kind of have separate spaces there, separated by furniture. I even had a 12'x14' main floor office that was all my own space, while my wife went to school and then worked all out of the house, so it was never crowded. The kicker was a fully finished basement bathroom with a shower (no bathtub). It was only about 3'x8', so hardly increasing sqft total, but the convenience of it was worth hundreds of sqft. The rest of the basement was unfinished, but we used it for some crafts, workshop, storage, etc. My wife's parents' house is even smaller, like sub-1400 sqft, and they raised 2 kids from birth to college. Like us, they have a finished 3/4 bath (toilet/shower) in the basement. I sincerely believe that the key to having a nice, smaller house might be having a finished, nice bathroom in the basement, even if the rest of the basement isn't finished. I grew up in a smallish house, about 1300-1400 sqft that my parents doubled in size when I was a young teenager, like 14 or 15. So I was used to the smaller sized houses of the early-mid 20th century. They felt perfect to me, and still do I guess.
• Sharlin 8y ago
  American suburbian standards are so utterly ridiculous, and apparently getting even more ridiculous. When I was a kid our family (parents+three children) lived in a 100m^2 apartment and it was plenty. I mean, you do have families living in cities too? No way to have close to 50m^2 per person there without being a millionaire! Such a ridiculous number cannot be anything else than marketing speak.
• derekp7 8y ago
  My last house was quite a bit bigger than current one, but id didn't have any more space. Sure, the master bedroom was huge, but that just meant there was that much floor space to walk across to get from the bed to the bathroom. There was a "great room", which had a dining room table on one side (mostly unused, except to collect junk), and an empty living room on the other side. Separate family room adjoining the kitchen (knee wall separating them), where TV was. Only useful feature was a full sized basement (which collected a bunch of junk), and 2 full baths upstairs. Current house still has 3 bedrooms, they are a bit smaller though. And 1 1/2 bath.
• rayiner 8y ago
  Make your kids share a room and limit how much crap they accumulate. My brother and I grew up in an 1,100 square foot house with our parents and never felt cramped. (On the flip side, if you don't aggressively limit crap accumulation, a substantially larger home will feel small. Our house is about 2,800 square feet, and we're looking to finish the basement and add another 800 because everyone has too much crap.) In terms of layout, big bedrooms and big bathrooms account for a lot of square footage but don't add much utility. Our main floor bathroom is the size of a small bedroom, and we got furniture in it so we could store some of our crap.
  • wglb 8y ago
    Sounds like your basement is on the way to becoming what I had in my previous house—one giant closet.
• dsajames 8y ago
  450 is not required. For thousands of years nobody but the top .0001% had that kind of space. The biggest myth is that each kid needs their own room. The second is that you need a guestroom. Then you have kitchen + dining room, then huge garages to store all kinds of crap.
  • checkyoursudo 8y ago
    We ended up in our current house because my wife wanted a large enough dining room, a spacious kitchen, and a guest room. The kitchen is much bigger than necessary, though certainly nice to use. We do use the dining room a lot, but only for eating as a family and not entertaining much, unlike how she imagined. What we had in smaller houses would have sufficed. The guest room was used once, and may never be used again as a guest room. The people she imagined would stay end up staying in hotels instead. It would have been cheaper as a proportion of the cost of our house to buy a cheaper house and to set that money aside and pay for hotels for our guests ourselves. But that's life. My life, anyway. Live and learn.
• DoreenMichele 8y ago
  When I was the wife in a 4 person nuclear family, my two favorite places were both around 1300 square feet.
• fulafel 8y ago
  "Various outlets" sell desire to consumers and advertisers.