Looking at house plans...

[Juliacat]

I like to look at floor plans as a hobby. So I bought a magazine called Small Homes, full of plans of houses that are supposed to be small.

The smallest house in the whole entire book was still bigger than our house. And it was marketed as a vacation retreat, not as a place where you'd want to live full time.

It was just kind of...jarring to me, to wonder where my reference group is.

[cdmaze]

I've gone through a bunch of house plan books....and, yeah...alot of the "small" homes make our house seem like a tool shed. Crazy.

[avendesora]

We have a 1600 sq ft house, which is small for our area. I remind myself that 750 was average only fifty years ago. We need to simply do with less stuff! We don't need 3000 sq ft worth of house and worth of stuff!

I expect that at some point in the future, small has got to become trendy again. We can't keep going with these new McMansions (springing up all over my area - I can't believe the size of some of these new homes!). They're just so un-green - they require a lot to heat, a lot to cool, a lot of energy just to vacuum the whole thing. Even if they are more energy efficient than my older home, are they really cheaper to maintain? I would guess not. This trend - new home sizes increasing by 1000 sq ft every decade - can't continue.

My SIL who has a 3700 sq ft home asked me after the birth of my first DC, "Do you have any plans? Because you can't possibly keep living in this house if you have any more children. You'll have to put on an addition or move." Can you believe the nerve? (ok, she didn't phrase it that harshly, but that was her message.)

I just need to remind myself that simplicity is beautiful. Living in closer quarters than some will require us to do more spiritual growth than we might otherwise choose to.

Since when did 1600 sq ft become small? I try to remind myself how many millions of families all over the world live in nothing but shantytowns. We're really very lucky.

Aven

[Juliacat]

our house is 680 square feet. 1600 would be like a mansion to us.

But, the only room that seems small to me is the living room--the rest of the house is fine.

[Yooper]

We have about 1300 sq feet and that seems huge to me. It is about the same size of house that other 3-4 person families live in. Most of the local houses are 100+ yo mining houses so they are all sort of the same. I guess you could call it a very old McMansionville I am told that these houses got slapped up faster than it takes to wheel a mobile home onto a lot. I am shocked at how solid they are. I do get strange comments from out of town guests about how small it is. We do use all of it daily but could certainly get by with much less and still be quite comfortable. i think of the people who lived in this house in days past when families were much larger.