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Comment by kpwags | Hacker News Reader

I have a 1300 square foot home with 3 bedrooms & 1.5 bathrooms. While my wife and I don't have kids, I'm happy with the size. Anything bigger and I feel like it'd be overkill for us. I wish the floorplan was a little more open or could be easier to open up, but otherwise I feel the size is perfect for our needs.

Obviously if children enter the picture, things might change, but I feel like having a house that's too big is more of a pain than it's worth...especially when you need to clean for company.

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Isn't this exactly what the article is talking about? 3 bedrooms for a no-children family being "perfect" size.

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

How many nights per year is your guest bedroom actually used?

As a guest bedroom? A few times a year, when distant friends and relatives top by. As spare storage for seasonal clothes, decorations and so forth? Probably 1 out of every 4 days. As a hobby room for things that don't work out well in the office? Quite a few more days. As a sleeping room for pets (ferrets)? Every day.

Edit: To be used as a guest bedroom, we tend to reorganize a bit (such as moving the pets to the master bedroom) but primarily we consider it the "guest bedroom". It sounds a bit nicer than "arbitrary spare room".

I’m curious what people use the office for.

I’ve seen people run actual companies and they needed a ton of space to keep legal documents, spec books, and a professional grade printer to copy binders of docs. They were fully utilizing the room.

But I doubt most people run companies, and personal docs usualy fit in a single box. Most people also use laptops, consumer printer/scanners are pretty unobtrusive, if people even keep one.

All of that would fit in half of a cabinet, so what I am missing that goes into an office room ?

That layout is how my house is laid out. The guest room is hardly used, but my wife works remotely, and I like to play around with side projects, so the office is quite useful.

For me personally, it's nice to have the room set aside for "work", keeping me a little less distracted.

I work from home 3 days a week, I use it for that. I'm on a lot of conference calls and need my own space with a desk and a door that closes. I also have a couch I can sit / lay on if I want to during the day, and a tv. Sometimes in the winter we watch tv in the office because it is warmer upstairs. I also use the office to store personal possessions like hobby stuff and work related plaques etc that would be taking up space somewhere else. House is 1500 sq ft and there are 2 people and 3 dogs.

In my early days, I ran my law office out of my house, and had an actual office, and clients sometimes came over. I have known a few lawyers to do this. I stopped after a few years because having kids ended up not being very compatible with this setup, but it did mean that our house was virtually spotlessly clean for a long time! My wife liked that.

For me, my "computer room" (office) has a couple bookshelves full of standard computer books, most of them are a decade or two old but still relevant. Things like W. Richard Stevens books, O'Reilly, Knuth, Tanenbaum, some books from college, etc. And I like having a table/desk to hold the model M keyboard and large monitor, and docked laptop. And I have a tower server on the side, and large 4-color laser printer.

But the most important reason for a dedicated office is to keep the cats out of my computer gear. And now that we have a toddler back in the house (S.O.'s grandkid that we are raising), keeping him out too.

We have a 2-bedroom (no kids) and do a combo guest bedroom / office which works well for us. Large futon instead of a full bed to save space. We don't work exclusively from home though nor have guests more than once every couple months so that helps.

That’s enormous for a couple with no kids. That’s the size of the average new home in 1960, when the average married couple had 3-4 kids.

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.

I wanna chime and say, it's not that huge...

I just bought my first home, and I live alone. It's a single story home, with a basement, built in 1959. The upstairs is about 1000 sq/ft, while the basement is only about 200 sq/ft making it strictly a laundry area.

Having now lived in the house for about 3 months, I can say that it's more than comfortable for me, and is easily managed in terms of cleaning. It's definitely not a huge place, and when I have friends over for dinner and there's more than 5 of us, it can feel quite cramped.

I guess if you live in Brooklyn in one of those 300sqft places, it would feel huge...

Holy cow, 1300sqft is huge. That could easily be enough for a family with 2 kids (with one more room maybe).

In my experience, a bigger apartment just means you'll collect more junk over time. The bigger your home, the faster it fills up.

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