Square Footage

One of the childhood experiences that J and I both went through was our parents asking "where are we going to put all these kids?"

For J, it meant that her family sold their "in-town" little home as the kids grew bigger and built a gorgeous 4 bedroom house on the top of a rural hill several miles away. She helped to roof, paint, and finish the floors herself.

For my family, it meant remodeling the kitchen and adding a large extra room above it. These were huge quality of life improvements for our family--no one was sleeping three to a room, there was an extra bathroom installed in what became my parent's new bedroom, my mother finally had space to turn around in her own kitchen without bumping into a teenager, and everyone finally had a little bit of privacy.

There are many EXCELLENT reasons for needing more space than your standard three bedroom (i.e., our current house) offers. But I'm thinking out loud about how good OUR reasons would be for needing more space.

I suspect that there has been some cultural creep in the American assumptions about how much square footage per person a household needs. According to an AEI study the median new house size has increased over 1,000 square feet per home since 1973 to almost 2,500 sq ft. (Our house, by the way, is definitely not that big.) At the same time, average household size has decreased from 3.01 to 2.54 persons over the same time frame. More space, less people. My growing up experience of forever sharing a room with a sibling (or, in some cases, more than one) would be unthinkable in the way we design and inhabit homes. (Or, at least, new homes.)

Things aren't too different in Canada, apparently, with the average square footage coming in around 2,000 sq ft per new home, and houses in Australia might actually be bigger, depending on which study you use. But in the UK (818 sq ft), France (1206 sq ft), Italy (872 sq ft), or poor tiny-homed Russia (614 sq ft) you have to somehow withstand your family in more confined quarters. (The lowest household size of those countries, by the way, is France, at 2.38 persons per household.)

We've tried to rethink a number of assumptions in the way we run our house--should we own a TV? Should our kids' primary social circle be members of their peer group? Is going to the same church really necessary? What's the point of a silverware drawer? Or of owning fewer mouthpieces than there are days of the month?

Now we are trying to figure out whether privacy and an isolated space is actually important for a teenager or not. We can survive this phase in our current house. We can probably have college kids come back to our house and get along for a week using just the one bathroom. But could we survive three teenage boys in 1400 sq ft? And (this is the part where it gets really juicy) IF (that's a BIG and in no way committal IF), IF we had another child at some point (not anytime soon) could we be a household of six in 1400 sq ft?

Survivors of teenage-boy-parenting, this would be a good time to hear your advice.