McMansion envy spreads as Americans demand more bedrooms and baths

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...

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

When I was the wife in a 4 person nuclear family, my two favorite places were both around 1300 square feet.

"Various outlets" sell desire to consumers and advertisers.

What is your cell phone bill? The person I know who does house cleaning charges $25/hr, takes 5 hours on the average house, and goes to most of their houses at least twice a month.

Master bedroom, guest bedroom, office. It's not an unreasonable way to live at all.

I think it reflects the amount of possessions we have now compared to the 1960s. People need space to store all that crap, also reflected in the fact that the storage business is booming.

I guess that kind of makes sense, since my house was built in the 1950s. It doesn't feel all that large though.

I will admit that I might be a little skewed given that comparing my house to the others in my neighborhood, it's on the smaller size. Most houses I've seen go on the market in my neighborhood are generally 3-400+ sqft larger.

That's just nuts. We should go for more density, not less.

I’m in an area zoned in the 1930s, and my lot is 1/5 the minimum required for this zoning elsewhere in the county. It’s fantastic.

Leaving the constituent trees alive would be far more useful, if for some strange reason you actually use carbon impact as a metric.

No, because you need more energy to heat it up (and cool it down if you live in the US).