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Comment by paulcole | Hacker News Reader

I mean one reason is that you like it? I’ve never lived in an apartment larger than 600 square feet and 2600 seems so excessive to me.

Heating it, cooling it, filling it with stuff. Why bother?

I can bike/walk anywhere I need to go in town, have a $20 electric bill, am 90 minutes from the pacific and 90 minutes from the mountains. 80 miles of running trails 3 miles from my door. I’ll take that over some giant house in the middle of nowhere.

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Why bother? So there's space for your spouse and two kids.

I grew up with 2 parents and a sibling in a house under 1,000 square feet. I guess just a different approach to wastefulness and what it takes to be comfortable.

I think the is a difference between having space and hoarding things

It may work, but it is not necessarily ideal.

This is really helpful! I’m planning on having 2-5 kids. Can you let me know what square footage home would be necessarily ideal for those family sizes?

I had to check the unit conversion but I think that 1000square feet is almost the same as 92 square meters. If that is correct it's the regular size of a flat in Spain for a family. The flat where I was raised was 80 square meters and there where my parents, my sister and my. 3 bedrooms, a living room, kitchen and a bathroom. Thats the usual here.

Wife, kids, and me, all home all the time. I work from home, wife takes care of the kids and school. Plus we have hobbies. I would like a larger garage for shop space, but we could deal with a smaller yard tho.

Like I said in another comment. I grew up in a similar situation 4 people, home under 1,000 square feet. Just takes a different mindset and more conscious thinking about stuff and what you really need, I guess.

Or you have different needs and don't need as much space? Please don't be so dismissive about other people's lives and imply that they aren't being "conscious" about what they need.

Did you even read the original comment I replied to where people jumped all over me?

> Outside of a submarine, there really is little reason.

Because unless I missed it, I don’t see where you jumped to my defense.

Well, if you look around at older houses, they tend to be small, so it doesn't really make sense to frame it as some elevated consciousness.

When I was a kid, we didn't have anything like the monster SUVs of today. That's because an SUV in those days was basically the same as the now-mostly-discontinued mini-pickup trucks with a built in cap and two doors. There was nothing with seven seats and four doors and 300 hp and so on. So people weren't making conscious decisions not to buy that.

Yeah the area where I grew up had no older houses. Florida swamp getting filled in with what would now be called McMansions and one 1000’ house designed/built by my dad — no air conditioning either. Definitely a conscious choice lol.

But thanks for the education on older homes and SUVs.

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