I live in a tiny little cottage. Just this morning it seemed like a normal house, but sometimes it gets much smaller when I see it through someone else's eyes.
I was reading a diary today by someone who's had a hard time recently with family health issues and moving and such and I really did feel for her and have no problem at all with the diary. I enjoy her writing, but this time, included her tale was the fact that she was having to move to a "tiny little cottage" of 1200 square feet and I found myself wondering when that became a tiny residence in America. That's the size house I grew up in and it seemed like a good sized house at the time compared to some of the other houses in my neighborhood. I live in that same 1200 sq. ft. house now, with my two boys and my pets and my boyfriend and all our junk and toys and clothes and stuff my parents left there. The house is over 90 years old and has one bathroom and 3 small bedrooms and it's ok for us. It seems like a normal size house even now, actually. I don't feel cheated, and I actually feel lucky to have an actual house rather than an apartment half that size like some of my friends have, but I feel a little weird that it's kind of substandard these days.
So when did we turn this corner in America, around which a 1200 sq ft. house is tiny? I'm 40 and it seems like that was a normal thing when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s. Even the rich-ish kids I went to school with maybe lived in places that were 1800 sq feet. I didn't know a single person who lived in the kind of 3000 sq ft house that seems commonplace these days. Do people in other countries expect that much space or is this pretty much an American thing, and why? I've only spent any significant amount of time in one other place, which is Japan, where my home and yard would be fairly palatial, so I really don't know.
I'm not against people living in whatever size house they can afford and want to live in, I'm a live-and-let-live girl, but I wonder how it got to be an American middle-class expectation that we'll all have giant houses with high ceilings and three bathrooms and a two car garage and a TV room, and anything less is pitiable. I drive through my neighborhood and other places around town and I see the old houses like mine and I wonder who lives there now, because my children's friends, middle class folks like me, all seem to live in suburban palaces. A suburban acquaintance of mine (who grew up poor herself) recently opined about a mutual friend's 1100 sq. ft. one-bathroom home that she didn't know how she could live there with three kids and a husband, that it was just awful. When did those of us living in the kind of plain homes we grew up in become objects of pity?
Anyone else live in a tiny little cottage like mine? Survive somehow in a 600 sq. ft. apartment? A 24 foot trailer? Find the idea of 1000 sq. ft. per person a little bit wasteful? I'm feeling a little alone today in my view that I and my children are, by the standards of how the world really lives, incredibly lucky. But we are.