4 ms·
Last year my wife and I bought out first house. Given our budget, we had the option of either buying a new big McMansion type home further out from the city, or
by ykl 6y ago
Last year my wife and I bought out first house. Given our budget, we had the option of either buying a new big McMansion type home further out from the city, or buying a smaller older home closer to the city. We wound up buying a smaller house built in the 1940s and gutting/renovating/modernizing the interior, and on a whole I'm really happy with the result.
The house itself feels like when it was originally built, more careful thought was put into where windows are, how rooms are lit, how rooms are ventilated, how spaces flow into each other, and so on and so forth. After our renovation work, we now also have all of the modern niceties like ethernet running through all of the walls and a shiny kitchen and shiny bathrooms and modern hardwood flooring and whatnot. Every part of the house now feels like it's the way it is specifically because we wanted it to be that way, and relatively speaking, it cost less than it would have to get a new cookie-cutter McMansion type monstrosity around here. As a bonus, the neighborhood feels cozier and friendlier and less empty compared to newer cookie-cutter type development tracts too.
The only downside is that the square footage is considerably smaller, but I have no idea what people are supposed to do with all of the empty space in a giant house anyway. Oh, I guess another minor downside was discovering that no two doors in the entire house are exactly the same size, so we wound up having to get custom doors made.
Of course, your mileage will vary depending on where you are, budget, contractors, etc; we lucked out and managed to find contractors that cared about their craft and put a lot of thought into things.
- thomk 6y ago> I have no idea what people are supposed to do with all of the empty space in a giant house They fill it with shit they don't need. Kudos to you.
- m463 6y agothey're filled with "I might need..." or "maybe I will use..." (eventually becoming "I forgot I had...")
- thomk 6y agoYep I moved into a house that was over double the size of my last house and somehow I'm out of room again.
- blaser-waffle 6y agoHonestly, that's a huge advantage of a house: you can keep the stuff you might use. I'm in a small apartment downtown -- great location -- but if my wife and I both want to keep a bike then we're out of luck. Plus well located apartments aren't so great during COVID.
- m463 6y agothere's a difference there - that's stuff you will use. It doesn't take all your garage to hold that.. unless it's say, a car :)
- faster 6y agoGeorge Carlin did a great routine on 'stuff'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac "a house is ... a pile of stuff with a cover on it".
- thomk 6y agoLOL thank you for this. Watching it now, hilarious and as usual Carlin is spot on.
- kjs3 6y agoIndeed. I had any number of friends who bought the biggest house they could afford, because that was what you were 'supposed to do', only to be buried by the cost of filling a 4000+ sq ft monstrosity with enough 'stuff' that it didn't look empty, then heating/cooling, cleaning, etc. all that 'stuff'. I know some of those folks have rooms that a decade or two down the line that they've opened the door to less that a dozen times, much less ever used for anything more than a place to pile stuff out of the way.
- xur17 6y ago> I have no idea what people are supposed to do with all of the empty space in a giant house This has been a major pain point when trying to look for houses. Newer homes are typically significantly larger than I am looking for, and the nicer "older" homes are also larger than I want.