I agree, as your kids get older, they will want and need their own rooms. For many people, a home office could contain a convertible couch and double up as a guest room, but that probably wouldn’t work well for you since you work from home.

We have promised our children to keep their rooms for them at least until they graduate college. But DH might be giving up his office and working from home much more, so we may need a home office sooner rather than later.

So even 25 years later, the house is still in flux.

About my son in the basement … Don’t call CPS, he has a window and a lightwell, lol. I would not have let a child live there “full time” but it perfect for a college kid (now grad school kid) who only comes home on school vacations.

We do miss having a garage though. Since our house WAS the garage, we don’t have one. Happily we’re not into fancy cars, lol.

It was originally the garage / gardener’s lodge of the huge house next door, and we extended it twice. (Once we extended it to add a bedroom and bathroom, then we raised the roof on the extension to add another bedroom and bathroom.)

Europeans (apart from the Brits) don’t “trade up” often. Until about 10 years ago, closing costs here were 12% (now they’re 8%) so the common saying was that you had to stay at least 4-5 years to recoup your closing costs.

Our house has six bedrooms, and three bathrooms. In 2000 sq ft, so you can imagine most Americans would scoff at the size of three of the bedrooms (one is technically a walk-in closet, 8.8 m2, a bedroom here is 9m2, and two of the bathrooms. It’s a doll’s house to most Americans!

But we made do. When we had number 4, we only had 5 bedrooms, and we lost our guest room, which was precious to us, since we’re both foreign and we people come to visit they stay for a while. We considered “trading up” when N° 4 was born, but we couldn’t really afford it. When N° 1 went off to college, we redid a basement room for him and bumped the other three up, and got that walk-in closet back for a guest room. Yes it was tight for a few years but we made it work.

Now the house is paid off, and it’s nice to have a house all our kids were born and raised in.

Most European countries (not the UK) don’t go debt-crazy so you don’t have as many people who can’t afford their mortgages, people tend to “make do”.

I am fine with the size of our home except I do like having an office. So we’ll look for a 4 bedroom house next – a bedroom for us, a girl’s room, and a boy’s room, and an office.

The only really big problem though, is one bathroom. It’s livable – obviously we live here, but I would greatly prefer to have a master bathroom.

Layout definitely will be the most important criteria in our next move.

I don’t know the sqft-ages, but the house we used to live in had 2 bedrooms (although one was large and shared with me and my sis), a large bathroom, large sitting room with tv and hifi, and huge kitchen-diner that also housed the computer.

Our current house has 4 bedrooms (one each now and one converted to a computer room), one of which is ensuite, a main bedroom, a slightly smaller lounge, with separate dining room (a lounge-diner with an archway), a smaller kitchen, small utilitary room, conservatory and integral garage.

So, a good example of things that get duplicated are clocks. Before we had 5. One in each of the 2 downstairs rooms, one in each of the bedrooms, one on the stairs. (I used to sit at the top of the stairs when I was on the phone. Oddly it was the place with the most privacy.) Now, we have at LEAST 8. One in the lounge, another one in the dining room because you can’t see the lounge one from there, one in the conservatory, one in the kitchen (not counting the one on the cooker), one in each of the three bedrooms and one in the computer room. That’s the minimum. Some rooms have more than one out of choice. We also have one in the hallway, because we didn’t know where else to put it but we don’t need it here. This isn’t counting the garage or my stepdad’s workshop-shed. (I don’t know if there are clocks in either of those places.)

… I could go on and on about other duplicates.

Now, we moved coz my mum got married, going from 3 adults (or young adults) to 4, and my stepdad had a lot of duplicate stuff to us anyway so we haven’t shelled out for all of it.

But the point still remains that somehow we end up needing so much more for bigger houses, that actually we don’t really need at all. And this is not counting all the stuff we have sitting around that we’re not using, something like clocks are used every day.

Rather than go with a starter, move up, and swap back down, we’re hoping to stay in this one for good.

In Europe, my MIL shared a room with her brother until she was 12 and he was 17. There wasn’t any other option.

Now, my husband (7 years older than myself) and I are starting to think about retirement and the maladies of growing older. We are planning to build a new one-level (plus basement) house on our acreage. Thus far, it is around 1400 sf. We plan a smaller spare bedroom, two bath, large pantry and kitchen, smaller living room. It will be handicap accessible. It will be energy efficient. I want less, he wants more – of course. We’ll compromise when it comes time to finance!!

We will recycle everything we can from the old house into the new house. Then, his plan is to turn the old house’s basement into a fish pond. Hmm…

I really wish we had a dedicated, partitioned area to use as an office. I commonly work from home and I can either choose to work in basement and smell the catbox all day while trying to ignore the kids, or try to work upstairs where the kids can pester me while I’m trying to keep a roof over their heads.

I guess to some extent, the local coffee/pastry shop has become the “office”, with limitless coffee, free wifi and no interruptions.

Resale: tiny houses are tough to sell. Buying a more typical “family home” that’s larger will help me when it’s time to sell.

Quality and safety: I looked at some smaller homes, but the quality was not good and the neighborhoods weren’t very safe. Of course, quality and safety figure into resale, too.

I could have gotten a smaller house in a safe neighborhood if I had been willing to buy an older (50+ yrs) home, but I didn’t want to deal with constant repairs.

My main point is that because a house is [generally?] an investment, there are many more factors than just what size you actually need. Maybe if you know you’re going to live in the same house for decades then resale isn’t a factor – but I don’t know anyone who can count on anything for decades into the future. JMO.