How BIG is yours?

Mine is about 1,800 I think. The guest room situation is a bit precarious, but we've had several people crash on the couch and that's worked OK. It was a little 1920's house that was then added to in the 90's; before that we've always lived in old (original/ unadded-to) houses, so this is the first time we've had a family room. (The original was just living - dining - kitchen on the first floor and 1 normal bedroom, 2 tiny bedrooms + 1 tiny bathroom upstairs; now there are 2 normal/big bedrooms, 1 tiny bedroom [that E.G. uses as his office] and 2 bathrooms [one for kids, one for grown-ups, that's the most overkill part of the house but it is handy] and a family room downstairs). I like the family room, nice to have with a kid. The living room can stay pretty much normal and then the kid stuff in the family room.

The basement is big and unfinished and kind of a mess but still useful -- my craft/ sewing area is in the "bunker", the newer basement under the extension, and it's been so utterly fantastic to be able to start a project, leave it, go upstairs and do whatever, and then come back to it undisturbed, after years of using the kitchen table for that kind of thing. Quelle luxury!

Deprivation breeds contentment, when it ceases. I've been without a shower or bathtub for a year, when I had a studio in the seventies and used the university building I worked in, that just happened to have a physical therapy shower area (shhhhhh!) and friends' places. I still appreciate the utter luxury of an ordinary shower, all this time later. Recently I've been doing without my refrigerator, as I have lolled about figuring what to do for tiny dollars on my new and variously previously loused up abode, then decided to tile the wretched floor, taking up much of my savings, such as they are; next Saturday I get my refrigerator moved in, lawdy, lawdy. Have been using Abq pals' tiny fridge and buying ice for a cooler every two days. This has been trying for a mad cook, that is, someone who cooks almost for self therapy.

On square footage, I am fairly freaked out by the increase in the average US house size, for probably a dozen reasons I won't go into here, at the same time I do appreciate there being a range of housing sizes and styles. I have an architect pal who designs 400 sq. foot houses (and much else), and am acquainted through my landscape profession with some thoughtfully designed estates that even with my semi puritan views I still am glad these buildings exist. It's the general ballooning in numbers that I think is inappropriate if we are going to have efficient clustering of residences and services and not eat up all the agricultural land and the desert too.

One of my old smartass group pals lives in Woodside, CA now - they bought a - guessing, but I'm not usually far off on residence measurements - 900 sq foot house that they've now added on to so that it is probably 1400 sq. feet. Talk about surrounded by mansions. Some 40,000 sq. footers in their town.

Me, I've mostly lived in small places, well under 1000 sq. feet, with the exception of a house we rented and one we bought in Evanston, Illinois - in a certain five year period of my childhood.

I've lived in a teeny house in Dayton, Ohio; let me guess, 400-500 sq. feet, possibly less. My parents had a nice but small apartment in the Bronx for a year, say 600 sq. ft. max. Lived in two small rooms in a building in Venice Beach, bathroom w/no shower down the hall (say, 275 sq. ft.), and in that studio I mentioned before that was three thousand square feet - an old Eagle's lodge, with bathrooms but no bath or shower, and, oh, seven broken windows when we moved in in January. I've lived in three California craftsman bungalows, two I've owned. One I loved dearly, the 750 sq. foot one, and the one I left recently were both treasures of design. The last one was too big with too much work for my small income and I had to sell it. In contrast to the small bungalow that my ex and I had lived in, which I drove away from the last time screaming, I felt only a certain guarded enthusiasm for leaving the last place. But, I bet it grows in my mind in its specialness, as it was indeed special. To be specific on size - well, I can't, do I count the 400 sq. foot basement? The glass enclosed front porch? Just as a flash number not counting those two, say, 1800. Plus, a couple of falling apart garages and a large side yard.

So now I live in a so-called townhome of something like 1200 feet. Comfortable for me, and it'll be at least half painting studio and design office, creek not rising. To that end, I bought some canvasses today...

I missed this -- totally.

My first apartment was about 300 sq feet, so fabulous! My OWN living room!

(Y'all know my McMansion rant, my poor old block in Naperville, sigh...)

It's no longer a question of "how big." It's now, "where's the viagra?"

Currently I live in about 800 Sq ft in Port, but still maintain about 1250 in Cedarburg as well. In Florida, I did the big shrink from a 2500 house +++ to a 1250 Condo and couldn't have been happier with it. 1250 is about perfect for me... so I'm currently waiting for one that size to open up in Port in December. I'm sure things will change if I ever start a family.

Soz, you might enjoy how I'm now working out my space, re what room for what (this has kept changing with new info). I have a lot of possessions in a 10 x 20 storage facility. Art books and landscape arch binders not the least among the boxes, then comes photo... I can't say these are hobbies, as they are all part of my businesses, and possibly future businesses, but they're also y'know, part of who I am in action, or even who I am at rest.

So, cutting to the chase, I have a weirdly shaped living room, which I've remedied re shape somewhat by closing off a seven foot second access to the kitchen with a new stud wall/finishing.

I have an ok kitchen, now enhanced by having that other side of the new stud wall. All I have to do is strip all the cabinets....

I have a 10 x 12 or so foot bedroom + closet. That'll do, I like it, it is close to the purported placement of the refrigerator, heh, and, out the ugly streaky window is... the perfect and ever changing sky. Check.

I have the assumed master bedroom. Well, the master bath is f'kd and I can't afford to install a new shower. A very large person stepped (son of previous owner) stepped on the drain... but then, I don't think that's his fault, that is only an indicator of how bad the shower underlayment is.
Never mind. The master bedroom is now the library.
That's largely because I can't afford to put in more windows and doors there. Girl can do bookshelves. Who knows what I'll make of the master bath. Perhaps the master closet.

A third bedroom of something like 9 x 12. Computers and drafting table.

So, where is my painting studio... the only sensible place, where the light is best even if the room is not facing the traditional way, north. Indeed, it faces south and somewhat east. The Living Room. So, the living room will be painting/art books/a couple of chairs - it works, that is the room with the ten foot ceiling height...

and the dining room table will go in the middle of the 'library'.





I'm well aware I've carried this thread beyond intent, but I just got going..
Underneath just talking about me, I am somewhat getting at that so much of building practice has circumscribed patterns, and we all don't have to just march in step.

You guessed right, I love this stuff. I'm hoping there will be a photo essay on this whole process at some point, I'm so curious. I'm curious about this kind of thing (renovations/ redecorations) pretty much no matter what, but there is a whole other layer of interest and curiosity because it's YOU.

My house in Naperville was WEIRD -- it must have been renovated several times in its lifespan but we never worked out who or when or what things used to be. It was built in 1900, probably a very modest boxy farmhouse at the time. When we moved in, it had this impossible room in the front. The previous tenants had used it as a dining room (as there was no other "dining room") but I thought it was utterly unsuitable. It was smallish, and to get a table anywhere useful (i.e., not smushed against a wall), it had to be right in your path as you came in the front door. As in, open door, maneuver around table... WEIRD!

Then there were all of these offshoots making it more of a broad hallway than a room -- living room door, guest room door, and stairway to upstairs boomboomboom in a row, and door to kitchen at the back.

The kitchen (almost definitely a new add-on) was large, and we just put the table in there. Then I made the weird room into the library. Put every single bookcase in there, including (the big brain wave) two short ones back to back, next to the entrance, creating more definition and room-i-ness to the weird hallwayish room. An armchair next to the window, some 7 bookcases, a lamp next to the armchair, thassit. Worked nicely.

I just realized I contradicted myself in the space of a couple of posts -- that 1900 house had to have been added to, also, but we knew no details. No family room, anyway. The Pasadena bungalow was all original. (Such a jewel, small but gorgeously laid out.)

I've been a tad down lately, re photoing... as I have submitted to anger, despair, miniexultation, despair, rewind, about my front landscaping. I know better than all this, of course... I was going with cheap and known, just like people who aren't usually clients of mine do.

I'll explain this sometime, summarize as 'listen to self', but it has affected my energy for flicking pics. Whatever, as I rumble around disgruntled in an unaccustomed role, I've gotten closer to my neighbors.. and closer to my dreaded but simpatico retaining wall installer, who does like futbol... saving grace for both of us.

Sorry, tangenting, will start new thread when I have some photos.

Thst's it, some of the smallies worked well. We ended up rennovating the Venice place only slightly, re circulation, as we got more a clue to the sense of the place and the appropriateness of it, sort of a beach cottage in the first place. Geez, my first idea was a lap pool into the bathroom. Luckily I got over it.

Sounds fantastic, but that was the kind of thing architects were thinking in the early eighties, and Venice was, and still is, a playground now costly to the new owners.

Venice became a substrate for architecture at the same time it was just a place. When I moved there, my neighbors were a postman and wife and butcher and wife.



I suppose... where else might I mention this..

a landscape architect/artist friend of mine and I did a photo exploration of the Venice walk streets.... something like a thousand photos at the cusp of when the high end folk were a cumin' in. The photo essay we never finished developing was about the interconnection of all those places.


but, back on our house, it was just a house. Now Frank Gehry is building his own house a few lots away - if he still is, last I read of it is about a year ago, might've tanked by now.

There is a basic absurdity...

Architects played in Venice because it was the cheapest local place.
I dunno, I suspect Dennis Hopper still owns one of the three plywood houses Gehry did on Nebraska Ave. The absurdity I am exclaiming about is the transformation by anointment, anointment being an architect showing up and experimenting. That neighborhood was ordinary ghetto. Nebraska avenue was not safety city when Hopper bought there. The area is still home of varients of crips and bloods, re some recent news. Look up the homicides if you want. It was part of my larger neighborhood.
Makes me interested in Hopper.

I went riffing ...sorry to obscure with my own surging points of view the main point, as in, what IS home size?

Re: How BIG is yours?
My Budapest apartment is 70 square meter -- thats about 750 square feet.

Keep in mind tho - this is one of the cool things about living in Budapest.

In Holland, I paid the same $$ in rent (500-550 euro a month, utilities included) - for an apartment half as big. That one was 36 square meter, or 390 square feet.

Lived in there with the two of us, for a year or two, as well.

Whereas my Budapest apartment is actually considered expensive for local standards.

World of difference!

Of course both apartments are pretty smack downtown. Further out in either place is cheaper.

Size in square feet is important, but equally important is layout.

I wouldn't have a clue. 3 bedrooms, one bath, small laundry, kitchen and dining is sort of combined and the living room. Big two car garage. Best part is it's doubled in value in the four years since I bought it.

quoted and confused myself, back in a bit on that.

in the meantime,

Oh, you are so right, Noddy.
The thing with layout is that it becomes interesting , in context, when you explore ...

and on downtown, nimh, nods in positive way. Downtown is as much a community as any other complex place, might even be more tight. OK, downtowns vary...

Reyn- Florida temperature goes from fairly warm to hot all year round. Because of this, a lot of houses have lanais or Florida rooms, where people can go when they don't want to be indoors, but don't want to bake in the sun.

A lanai is an extension to the house, that has light walls part of the way up, and is screened in. It is usually not air conditioned, but might have ceiling fans.

In a Florida Room, the walls are sturdier, and there are usually windows, sometimes jalousied. It is usually not air conditioned, although I have seen Florida rooms with separate room air conditioners placed in the wall. Most newer Florida homes have central air conditioning.

In my case, my house originally had a lanai. The first owner extended the room, and made it part of the house. It is now my den.

Letty- Usually a house square footage is figured by the part of the house that is "under air". Some semi-unscrupulous realtors will include the garage and lanai as part of the square footage, but an honest one will give two figures.

I've got a 'shotgun house'. Pretty common in this part of town. Living/dining space directly in front of the kitchen on the ground floor. Three bedrooms and a bathroom in a line, more or less, upstairs. About 450 square feet on each level. Cosy, but not squishy.

this kinda thing



I'm lucky in that I have one of the only driveways in the neighbourhood. A friend has one of the smaller houses on one of the narrowest properties around - 15' wide

The clever builders in Fla have taken to the term "under roof"... and then they even measure the overhang...

You don't pay here (by law) for everthing which is below 1.5 m (little less than 5 feet) and all parts which are 'open' (like balconies) and have no windows.

So we don't have to pay for those red hatched parts. (The scale at the bottom is exactly 50 feet, btw).


There are four more condoniums in the house, two on each storey: smaller to the North (~ 750 square feet), larger to the south (~ 970 square feet)

It was quite exclusive, when these houses were built back in 1970