How much room do we really need?
Last week I read a great post by Megan at Before Our Time: When parents didn’t need retreats. Megan wants to renovate her house (originally built in 1919), but everyone wants to sell her extra bedrooms and home theatres, which she doesn’t want.
Megan looks into what a typical older house was like, and how they started getting bigger. But I agree with her – surely there’s got to be a limit to how much house you need?
The average Aussie household only has 2.5 people living in it. But when I look in the new homes sections of the weekend paper, all I see are plans for homes with 4 bedrooms, a study, a home theatre, an outside kitchen and a pool room. There’s rarely a verandah, or even any eaves, so the sun just beats down onto our windows and makes our houses hotter while we turn up the air-con.
Block sizes are getting smaller, while houses are getting bigger. If you’re in a new suburb, there’s no room for a garden anymore, no room to grow any vegies or let the kids run around.
I’ve got a little 3-bedroom unit with a bit of garden. And yet cleaning it seems to be a never-ending chore (possibly because I am a slacker). The thought of having more rooms to clean, to keep cool in hot weather, to heat in cold weather, to make repairs to and decorate seems less like luxury and more like hard work!
It’s not very good for the environment: more roofs instead of lawn, more materials used to build, more cleaning products, more electricity to keep them the right temperature. I think we can do better. Since Australia has decided that smaller block sizes are the way to go with urban planning, why aren’t we going for the benefits of downsizing our houses too?
We need to rethink our ideas of what a happy home is, and what luxury really means. For me, it’s having a snug little place with enough room to cook a nice meal, put my feet up while I watch a bit of tv, and have a vegie patch. Anything more is a pain in the arse 
How about you? What’s your idea of a well-sized house?
7 Comments
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Great post! I have always been passionate about having a house as small as practical. Give me a cottage over a McMansion any day!
I also love the challenge of living on a small block and being innovatinve about fitting everything in.
Its not only the huge houses that is sad – but its also the thought of all the ‘stuff’ they are filled with.
Cheers,
Tricia
Thanks Tricia! When I was renting, I moved from having my own room in a sharehouse to having a whole house to myself and my partner, and the amount of stuff I bought just ballooned out to silly proportions. I had a lot of crap for just one person! I think it’s human nature to want to fill up the gaps, so having a smaller house can help us keep it to a reasonable amount.
We have the same issues in the States. It’s bothersome. When we were house hunting our families were very much about how BIG a house we should buy – we are only 2 people and a small dog. We thought we were being extravagant because we wanted a 3 bedroom home. 1 room to sleep in, 1 as an office and the 3rd as my craft/guest room. It was very hard to get it thorugh the family’s head that we didn’t go small because we were poor, we went small because that’s all we needed!
Yeah, sometimes there’s a lot of peer pressure from people who care about you, but have different ideas of what will make you happy!
I agree. The “McMansioning” of the suburbs is forever concerning me. The suburb I live in was once dominated by 50-60s style weatherboard/fibro three/two bedroom homes. Because these homes are on relatively large blocks and fairly close to the city they are being snapped up only to be knocked down to make way for McMansions. These houses are incredibly ugly, designed badly and a total wreck for the environment. They take up most of the block, and pretty much all of the original trees are cut down to make way for the houses and their small over-landscaped gardens.
We recently had one built next door, which not only blocks out half of our winter light on our roof it has a range of terrible design options. There is probably not enough room here to mention all the short-falls of this house so the few obvious ones are: it has a black roof, no eaves and is built around the wrong way ie the huge glass doors and atrium style room all face west so they end up heating the house up to maximum temperatures in summer, and in winter the house probably doesn’t not catch any sun. In short, the house is like a hot box in summer and probably a freezing box in winter.
The owners solve this problem by running their air conditioner and heaters all day. I find it quite insane that local councils are still approving such badly designed houses in this era of climate change. Why aren’t councils forcing new homes to be designed for maximum energy efficiency rather than maximum energy wasters? The house next door does have its token 2000 litre water tank, which by the way – the owners haven’t even hooked up to use.
I know exactly what sort of house you mean! You’d think house designers had no idea what kind of weather we get in Australia.
I’m glad you enjoyed the post (thanks for the link). Renovating our house in a sensible way to suit both our needs and our climate is challenging in an environment which considers big is better.
My current challenge is to ensure that my laundry-drying capacity is designed in a way such that I rarely need to use the dryer. I love the smell and feel of sun-dried washing!
I’m off to explore your site in more detail.