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Comment by lxgr | Hacker News Reader

> as an American living in Portugal [...] Just everything in Europe is tiny.

Sorry to invoke a cliche here but... Europe doesn't start and end in Portugal.

There are plenty of large-family apartments in some cities. Especially new developments usually have a mix of studios, one-bedrooms and beyond.

In terms of old buildings (i.e. older than ~100 years), many European cities have apartment buildings designed for wealthy families that would house their staff in the same building. The problem there is actually that these are too large to rent out to most families, not the opposite.

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I've lived/traveled outside of Portugal.

It really holds true across the continent. Stuff is just smaller.

With "stuff", are you comparing housing size in general? If so, I think that doesn't make sense given that single-family homes are just much more common in the US than they are in many European countries.

Comparing apartment sizes (i.e. excluding single-family homes) makes more sense in a conversation about family-sized apartments.

In my very limited experience, US apartments in expensive cities are often tiny as well, washer/drier in-unit is not a given (whereas any apartment without a washing machine would be considered archaic/unlivable in many places in Europe), and the most economical option to get more space is to move to a single-family house.

Well yeah, that's a good example.

I haven't always had a laundry room in apartments I've rented in the US. When I haven't, there's been a shared machine room that all the tenants use with rows of machines. But most of the apartments I've rented in the US have had laundry rooms.

Laundry rooms are, as far as I can tell, something that simply doesn't exist this side of the Atlantic. They put clothes washers in the kitchen and even in humid Porto, vented tumble dryers are pretty uncommon.

Granted, New York, Boston, and San Francisco are different. But if you're in Denver, or Austin, or Dallas, etc, you can expect an apartment with far more storage than similarly sized European cities.

> vented tumble dryers are pretty uncommon

Yeah, they're considered crimes against both delicate fabric and the environment :) Drying racks have the added benefit of humidifying apartments in winter, when the air often gets quite dry from heating.

One peculiarity at least in Germany is that people move with their washing machines (as well as with their kitchens, very often). While I do miss my in-apartment washer a lot, I don't miss having to think about how on earth I'm going to get it to the other side of town without breaking either somebody's back or stairwell...

Yeah, I get the energy savings with air-drying. And I've always air-dried certain items, too, because like you said, it's hard on fabric.

But right now, the humidity in Porto is 91%. A pair of jeans would smell bad before they finish air drying. Also, my 3 year old loves soup but hasn't really figured out how to hold a spoon without spilling. We do laundry so much because of that kid...

Maybe someone can enlighten me about how to do air dry all of my family's clothes. Clearly I'm missing something because I don't get it. If you lay out your clothes to dry on a rack, you have room for maybe half a load, so is a family just doing laundry every day?

People usually have multiple dryers (I used to use 1-2 for a single machine load by myself)! And use clothespins, they let you hang stuff more tightly spaced.

But yeah, hang-drying in high humidity is rough. It really works best in winter with heating on, or in summer with the AC running (which also removes humidity) if there is one. Ventilation is key, too (cross drafts are great; a room can get saturated very quickly).

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