Source: https://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/the-righteous-small-house...
And yes, greed is a negative trait when your greed means wasting things that you objectively do not need.
Also, no one asked me in incredulity how I could get by with less electricity.
“Need” is a flexible term; it's clearly possible for people to survive without any rooms. But, yes, there's plenty of reason to believe that there are benefits to having a private space.
But most likely a four-person family with a 4-bedroom house has two adults sharing the master bedroom, two children with their own rooms, and a guest room and/or office.
> and what is the probability that they all need to pee at the exact same time?
Hopefully, close to zero, since your hypothetical still has fewer bathrooms than people. But multiple restrooms.
But, it's actually quite likely that multiple people will be using bathrooms for either elimination or bathing at the same time, particularly in the mornings.
(It's also somewhat likely when entertaining, which is one of the reasons people want large houses.)
I do think we'll want to upsize to get a full guest room and maybe another half-bath, a 4bd would probably be perfect for us. But there's no urgency to move, bc. we have a good deal and it's actually quite comfortable - and very low maintenance.
Living in a smaller space you just learn to be efficient and not to collect junk. We have plenty of toys / things / whatever, it's not like we're zen minimalists, we just don't keep very much "stuff" that we don't use regularly. That's actually really nice.
We know a lot of families in the city that live in even smaller spaces. I think my takeaway from this is you can make whatever work, you just adapt to the space you have. I'm not saying it's better necessarily, it just really depends on all the other variables in your situation. For my family the nice neighborhood, very short commute, and affordable / low maintenance space is a win. Other people would choose differently.
How will that scale when they are teenagers? Especially if mixed-sexes, I can foresee this being difficult, which I think is part of the reason my wife and I are looking at separate bedrooms.
It's only bad when the kids go nuts and spread their mess out over the ground floor. You just have to learn to be tidy!
Our current and previous house have them, and the first house that I love did not. That house with a sunroom would have been amazing.
Sunrooms are probably my favorite part of a house now.
Current house still has 3 bedrooms, they are a bit smaller though. And 1 1/2 bath.
In terms of layout, big bedrooms and big bathrooms account for a lot of square footage but don't add much utility. Our main floor bathroom is the size of a small bedroom, and we got furniture in it so we could store some of our crap.
The layout of the 1500 was amazing. It was a story and a half, 3 main floor bedrooms, with the upper story usable as anything, including another bedroom if desired. The main floor bedrooms are small, but we tend to spend as little time as possible in them. No TVs. No computers. No school work. Not much play, unless wanting to be alone. Edit: One of the main floor bedrooms was super small, like only really a nursery/baby room, though still fine for a little kid.
The kitchen was small but super usable.
The living room was nice sized, long and narrow, like 25' x 10' if I recall. That meant you could kind of have separate spaces there, separated by furniture.
I even had a 12'x14' main floor office that was all my own space, while my wife went to school and then worked all out of the house, so it was never crowded.
The kicker was a fully finished basement bathroom with a shower (no bathtub). It was only about 3'x8', so hardly increasing sqft total, but the convenience of it was worth hundreds of sqft. The rest of the basement was unfinished, but we used it for some crafts, workshop, storage, etc.
My wife's parents' house is even smaller, like sub-1400 sqft, and they raised 2 kids from birth to college. Like us, they have a finished 3/4 bath (toilet/shower) in the basement.
I sincerely believe that the key to having a nice, smaller house might be having a finished, nice bathroom in the basement, even if the rest of the basement isn't finished.
I grew up in a smallish house, about 1300-1400 sqft that my parents doubled in size when I was a young teenager, like 14 or 15. So I was used to the smaller sized houses of the early-mid 20th century. They felt perfect to me, and still do I guess.
The biggest myth is that each kid needs their own room.
The second is that you need a guestroom.
Then you have kitchen + dining room, then huge garages to store all kinds of crap.
The kitchen is much bigger than necessary, though certainly nice to use. We do use the dining room a lot, but only for eating as a family and not entertaining much, unlike how she imagined. What we had in smaller houses would have sufficed.
The guest room was used once, and may never be used again as a guest room. The people she imagined would stay end up staying in hotels instead. It would have been cheaper as a proportion of the cost of our house to buy a cheaper house and to set that money aside and pay for hotels for our guests ourselves.
But that's life. My life, anyway. Live and learn.
I also have a one-car detached garage with no space for a car. If there's one thing I could change it's more space for storage and a shop. On the other hand it forces us to not accumulate too much junk.