19. Move to a Smaller House

How has it happened that the size of the average American home has gone from the roughly 900-square-foot, two-bedroom, one-bath home of the 1950s to a roughly 2,000-square-foot home with three bedrooms, three and a half baths, an eat-in kitchen, a dining room, a library, an exercise room, a “great” room, a TV room, at least a two- but often a three-car garage, and an entry hall that rivals the size of the Sistine Chapel? It certainly did not happen because of the need to house larger families; the average family size has gone from 4 in the 1950s to 2.5 in the 1990s.

The monthly financial burden of maintaining these behemoths has more than doubled, and in many cases tripled, from the 1950s. Today, many homeowners are spending more than half their monthly income on housing. In order to have larger houses, we’ve had to move farther and farther away from our jobs and community services. This in turn means we have to spend more time commuting and more money on gas and cars.

Many people are beginning to realize that what they’ve had to give up in terms of time, energy, and money to own a large house is just not worth it.

When Gibbs and I moved from the smog and the congestion and the four-hour commutes of the big city and suburbs to a more rural environment where we could live where we worked (#51), our first move was into a 3,000-square-foot house. We’d unwittingly bought into the eighties mentality that bigger is better. Besides, we needed that space to house all our stuff.

Once we had got rid of the stuff (#1), we realized we no longer needed all that space. When we moved to our small condominium, our goal was to scale down to easily manageable size in our accommodations, without loss of comfort or conveniences. It’s been a tremendous emotional and psychological relief not to have to worry about that big house, the big yard, and the ever increasing complexities of owning an oversized home that no longer fits our life-style.