Keep your house small

Keep your house small.  If your are in the market to buy a house, buy a small house.  If you own a house, resist adding on to it.

One is no longer able to claim, as has been claimed countless times to countless young adults as they establish themselves and consider purchasing their first house, that housing prices always go up.  I was told the same during the housing bubble of the late 1980s.  Perhaps you could call it the housing rush of the late 1980s.  I remember an open house where the house sold for well over the asking price within two hours of it being on the market.  We arrived at the open house and the house was already sold.  The market was crazy.  We had to buy quick or get priced out of the market.  We were told to buy as much house as we could because the more house you bought, the more of an investment base you had to reap the bounteous rewards of the ever rising housing market. 

We ended up buying a small house.  At around 1000 square feet, it served our needs.  Sure, we could have used more space. But, realistically all we really needed was more storage space. There is not much of an attic, no garage, and a small compromised basement (water infiltration during the spring snow melt), but we got by.  A few years later we had a son.  This put more pressure on the size of our house.  We were advised to add on to our house to accommodate our rising spatial needs.  A number of our friends added on to their houses as their children grew.  We too, felt the temptation as our son grew and our house increasingly seemed to lack some of the benefits of a larger house.

But larger houses consume more.  They consume more energy and materials in the construction of the house itself or of an addition.  And they consume more energy and materials year after year in heating/cooling, maintenance, and upkeep.  If you are a homeowner, the house you own is your house.  You are responsible for how that house functions as a part of our collective human impact on our planet. 

I am happy to say that we did not add on to our house.  While there were times, many times, that I felt that we should have added on in order to provide more space for our son and his friends, I now realize that it was not necessary.  We all survived.  Just as generations before us did, with larger average families and smaller average houses, we did fine.  And now that our son is away at college and, unless he boomerangs, is no longer living with us full time, we find our home quite comfortable without having added to it.

Full disclosure: We have supplemented our storage capacity.  Early on, we bought one of those small metal sheds.  This gave us a place for our lawn and garden tools, snowblower and the like.  The lifespan of that shed was shortened by a blizzard that collapsed the roof (which I repaired to get some more years out of it) but it served its purpose for 20 years or so.  Recently, I built a small barn to replace it.  This barn is large enough to not only replace the small shed but to also provide additional storage that allows for more efficient use of our basement and attic.  The key thing about the barn is that it is unattached to the house, and has no provision for heat.  If I had added on to the house, the temptation would have been to make the additional storage space unnecessarily heated space. 

Another argument for small houses is that they require proportionally less maintenance.  That means less time and money is required to maintain them.  All home owners need to budget for the maintenance of their property.  Whether it is a new roof, a coat of paint, adding insulation, or whatever, as the size of a house increases, so do the costs of upkeep.  This brings to mind another topic that I think about and that I will pursue in a separate post.

So please, think long and hard about the size of your house when considering a purchase or adding to your existing home.  Keep your house small.