Normalising small homes

[lorieats99]

I feel like you just see those big 4-5 bedroom homes on Instagram, and it’s often young-ish people in their 20s or 30s in them. I think that will be a thing of the past soon with rising costs. We rent a small-ish 2 bed new build and it’s easy to begin to feel inadequate about it! When guests come over there isn’t really anywhere for them to sit, as we just have one sofa. Two rooms upstairs, two rooms downstairs, downstairs WC and upstairs bathroom. Lovely spacious garden.

It feels like our home, I’d like a 3 bed in an ideal world but I don’t think that’s happening for us for realistically quite a while. Despite both being on average incomes we will probably be in our 40s before we achieve our forever home status. We are TTC soon, we have a small bedroom for the baby but we would have no room for a playroom or anything like that & I’m wondering how much this matters. I know in some parts of Europe people raise families in flats and apartments, and it’s very normal over there!

Does anyone else have a small home?

I could afford a big home as I moved from the south east to the west country where homes are much cheaper but I don't want one. I dont want another massive garden and I don't want the hassle of a massive house to clean. My little house is perfect for me.

I live alone & have a very small house. I love it. I had planned to buy bigger but decided to go for location rather than size. It was absolutely the right decision.

All my family & friends live in modern houses on modern estates. My house is on a village main street, its over 100 years old & has character.

It's only one bedroom but I only need one. I've got low running costs & a very small mortgage. Its significantly smaller to what my friends & colleagues live in but I absolutely love it

It sounds perfect.

We’ve just bought a 3 bed 50s semi with planning for a fourth bedroom and en-suite, cheaper than a three bed new build in the area and absolutely huge in comparison. We lived in a new build townhouse before and the downstairs layout was completely impractical, particularly with small children!

Lol! My kids play in the garden a lot. Trampoline, swings, climbing frame, paddling pool, sandpit, general racing around, football, bikes, scooters etc. They love doing gardening and it's really great seeing them connect with nature. They help harvest apples from the tree to make apple juice. We grow cherries, strawberries, raspberries, redcurrants and blackberries that they lick straight off the bushes. We grow olives and lemons and limes and herbs and lots of vegetables, too. They plant seeds or bulbs and water them and watch them grow into beautiful flowers. They watch birds come to the bird table where we leave food, and nest in the birdbox we put up. It would have been a huge detriment to their childhood not to have had this. Obviously many people do not have the choice sadly but to pretend that there's no benefit to it is madness.

I also very much enjoy that space myself, tending it and growing things. Reading a book in a hammock in the shade. Having BBQs, eating our meals outside in summer, glass of wine in the evening sunshine after work, a fire pit and heater for winter evenings. I would be so sad not to have a garden.

Pick straight off the bushes! Not lick. 🤣🤣 Although I wouldn't put it past them. 😆

Well, there's nothing wrong with having a small home. It's easier to clean. It's cheaper to heat, cheaper to maintain, etc. We've got a three bed home, but it is quite a smallish cottage. And it's quite cheap to run....

We have two adult children in their late 20s .. Both due to get married in the next year ... They have a 4-bed and a 5-bed home respectively. Detached. They're very successful career people and are on much more money than me and their dad - and they can afford it.

A few people have said, why do you, as a couple, need 4 or 5 bedrooms? But they probably have about 40 friends between them, and about a third of them live 80 to 200 miles away. Several abroad. So every few weeks there'll be somebody staying for two or three days.

Apart from that, they're going to have children. My one child wants three or four children, so they might as well just buy the larger house now so that they don't have to upsize any time soon due to a bigger family.

I'm with baby in two bed flat which is ideal for a baby as no going up and downstairs but when he gets bigger I'll want a garden

@WasJuliaRight at least it has a garage!

Ours is a similar footage and feels so small. I hate it. And we don't have 2 loos!

Loads of the ‘influencers’ on YouTube are in their twenties or early thirties and most I’ve come across live in large houses, they then decorate and then move to an even bigger one!

What's this all about? My house is not a mansion but it's a 2200 sq ft detached house and I'm a lone parent. What has property size got to do with marriage? Not that I'd be prepared to share it with anybody other than the two kids, mind!

From what I see of many married people they'd need a far bigger space to be able to live together happily and tolerate each other so I'm not sure how you think a smaller house would make it more pleasant? Most people wouldn't find having little personal space and a tiny house relationship enhancing, would they?

I have not made any sense have I… when I was married I lived in a big house and was very miserable, and didn’t have enough space of my own, just a sodding nightmare living with a knob and not enough time and money to keep the house nice. Always needed something fixing.

Now I am single and my house is a bit of a squeeze when people come over. But I’m happy and can afford the mortgage on my own. So what might seem a poky new build is perfect for me. Each room is so small it doesn’t take long to go from ‘the house is a tip’ to a quick whiz round and it’s nice again.

Anyway I’m rambling but apologies if I have offended with my badly worded post.

@CrapBucket ah ok that makes much more sense! Definitely agree that the more soace there is, the more tendency there is for people to accumulate clutter to fill it. I am at war with clutter: photos of my pre-kids minimalist house make me almost tearful. 🤣🤣 So yes, agree there's a lot to be said for not having more space just for the sake of it, if not needed. And for not accumulating crap!!

Also mortgages are a PITA at the best of times let alone now so can see the attraction of a smaller house just for minimising that worry. It was just the marriage reference I didn't understand, but perhaps that's because my ex-husband was a cocklodger and I was paying for our house then too. 🤦🏻‍♀️ At least now I have only two dependents.

@Enterchat and @Snoken, totsllt agree, another thing about the flats in eg Sweden is that the size of the apartment excludes the (often enormous) communal laundry room, cellar storage space and bike/buggy rooms which also frees up a tonne of space in the flats themselves...

lol - DH is a professional musician and there are quite a few instruments kicking around the place, but we do actually have a proper sofa!

there are 5 guitars at the foot of our bed though

I've lived in London flats all my life so have never had the idea that a proper home has to have a spare room, dining room, utility etc.

I don't know if our homes will shrink, but I do hope we get a lot smarter about how to use them. My current place is converted from commercial - was a pub, laundry, hairdresser, off licence. Its got not bad square footage, but all in the wrong places. My front room also serves as hallway, bedroom and office! So many bad conversions around, so many over-extended houses.

Ah OK so the problem is comparing ones life to an influencers. They are more than likely not paying for furniture or decor as everything is a #collab or #ad, and they get paid thousands per advertisement they though.

Maybe it's because we have a low Household income of £130k and I don't expect our household income to exceed £250k-300k so I see the housing crisis through the lens of someone who has relatively lower earning power (as I didn't get a starting salary of 100k from the get go) and think that it's more important for the country to have essential rather than ideal housing. There are 20 applicants for each rental and the average room rental is £700 (not just in London). So I just don't feel thinking in that way is helpful to most people who would be struggling to rent or to buy a small flat.. and I say this as someone who bought her home at 27 cos I was lucky and don't think I could replicate if I was a few years younger. I think most people who own don't realize what deep shit the country is in with regards to housing supply. I do as I keep updated with the cost of rentals. My little flat would now rent for £1800 based on other flats in the same development.

I see houses with gardens as the preserve of those who inherit or those who start earning £100k from age 22 in as little as 5-10 years time (regardless of property price crash) ..I bought in 2019 and am 31 years old but I don't see myself being able to afford more than a flat. I grew up in a large house but did have a 3 generation setup which most British people would rather not live in.. I could have a garden if I bought a period conversion but most of them have really bad floorplans and DH hates them. And I think the housing crisis has spread outside London now given that the room rentals are now £700 per room (London is £1000 per room). We would have families living in single rooms very soon and singles in cubicles.

They’re hardly a new thing. In SW17 there are streets of what estate agents like to call ‘artisan cottages’ - tiny little terraced houses* built around 1910. They are barely 55 sq m for a 2 bed house, with the front door opening directly into the living room and a ‘privy’ in the back yard.
At the time, when ordinary people had far less ‘stuff’, and coal was a major household expense, smaller rooms at least meant less space needing to be heated.

Interestingly, at around the same time, in the same area, 2 bed maisonettes of around 72 sq m were being built, each with a proper indoor bathroom. Maybe they were intended for those slightly one-up from the ‘artisans’. At that time, presumably all of them would have been built for letting, not for buying - except by a landlord.

*the last time I looked, a couple of years ago, they were still selling - or being priced at - around £500k.

Maybe it's because we have a low Household income of £130k and I don't expect our household income to exceed £250k-300k so I see the housing crisis through the lens of someone who has relatively lower earning power

Are you actually joking? How can you say £130k is low household income? That’s just ridiculous, and offensive.

I visited a friend in Sweden years ago. She was in a smallish new build but the design was so much more sensible, such as a combined shower/laundry/utility room and a building to store the bins. It felt light and spacious.

It was also the first time I'd ever seen an Ikea catalogue and fell in love.

You do realise you can buy an actual house with garden in lots of the UK for 130k, never mind an annual income of 130k?

You’ve got to unfollow the big houses that make you feel inadequate OP. There are plenty of “interiors” accounts from people with small houses. I quite like following them because it often shows what you can do with a small space.

I think your view is very London centric and you may need to realise you can’t assume it’s the same for other places. Your experience isn’t typical of the experience of those living outside London.