i've been thinking a lot about what kind of house we want to buy. not only what kind of house, but also in what neighborhood. for our price range, our options are to get a small house (right around 1000 sq ft) in a great neighborhood (where we currently live) or a bigger house (1200-1700 sq ft, with probably more than one bathroom!) in a much less charming neighborhood. the less charming neighborhood is less neighborhood-like, with chain restaurants and convenience stores nearby. the school also rates much lower than the school in our current neighborhood. i would rather live in a small house in a great neighborhood than a bigger house in a not as great neighborhood. i started making a pro/con list today for living in a small house.
pro: less time to clean, less energy to heat/cool, more time spent together, less money to improve aspects of the house such as new windows, roof, etc., less space means less stuff/things/materialism
con: less room for our various hobbies (sewing, canning, beer brewing, art making), less room for stuff could mean too much stuff everywhere (see my messy stack of books above. i'm terrible at organizing and maintaining clean surfaces, but my husband is great at it.)
one of our requirements is to find a place with three bedrooms. we would have a room, the kids would share a room, and we'd have a craft room. right now the craft room is downstairs and it is huge. it's 2-3 times the size of a small bedroom. we also want a place with a big enough lot that we could build a studio in the back for when the kids are older and need their own rooms, thus kicking us out of the third bedroom.
jessica, a good friend of one of my good friends, has started a lovely blog about living in a small home called Sunday Peaches. i love how she reminds us that many people living in other countries live in very small spaces and don't think it is strange at all, unlike here. she is one of my big inspirations for small home living. her instagram feed is one of my favorites. she and her husband and their three boys have been living in a 2 bedroom 735 sq ft house for the last six years! now they are adding on to their house a bit, but still only expanding to 1200 sq ft. if a family of five can live in 735 then our family of four should be fine in 1000, right?
I am all about the neighborhood. I look a bigger house as just more cleaning for me... no thank you! And smaller homes are just more cozy to me anyway. After our house sells we are relocating to Charlotte, and are planning to go into a much smaller space than we have now, and that's okay with me!
ReplyDeleteI love the area we both live in. We went for super crappy house =good area, and also small, 1050 sq. feet. Ours is 2 bedroom 1 bath, and have a odd long room that is a little to narrow for a bedroom. I think about 50-100 years ago, when putting a family in house this size was totally normal.
ReplyDeleteBigger houses are more cleaning and more cluttering. One of the most liberating times was when I fit nicely into 350 sq. feet of studio living. My studio-mates and I also just re-evaluated our situation. We were supposed to move, but decided to stick out our current location and just organize and be more creative with our space.
I'm all about the neighborhood! The neighborhood we originally wanted to live in has small houses and small yards with very big mortgages. We are on the other side of the city line in a "suburb" but still very much the feel we wanted and our yard is HUGE! Plus our mortgage is half of what it is in the other neighborhood. It is still a small house, but the yard more than makes up for it. I'm like you with the clean surfaces. I do wish my kitchen was bigger, but the I love the 60's vibe to it (finally with some modern appliance since the 1960's versions died). Some days we wish for a bigger house, but we really have too much crap and if we had a bigger house we'd fill it with crap too!
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