Houses today are twice as big as 50 years ago, but just as full.  We have two
(or more) mortgages, dining areas, bathrooms, cars, dogs, TV's, computers,
phone lines, jobs, and sets of kids.  Are our lives too crowded?  Would we
be happier with less?

31 responses total.

I know I'd/we'd be happier with (much!) less, since a) We don't have room for
all our stuff, and b) we'd have much less stuff to manage.

I think people just get into habits of having stuff.  Once you get used to
living with certain things, its hard to imagine life before them even though
you managed fine then.  If you don't have it, you'll never know what you're
missing.  Of course there are other things that just exist that you don't use
at all and take up space.  When I first moved out on my own, I had very little
and when I finally went back to visit my parents, I was amazed at how much
they had that I didn't even miss (who needs a t.v.?)

  I can't speak for anyone but myself but I do have way too much stuff
  and have been trying not to acquire new stuff unless (a) I really need
  it, and (b) I get rid of something that I no longer need..

Actually, if you look around the Kalamazoo area, houses built over 50 years
ago tend to be four times the size of today's.  I see your point, though. 
It seems like the more space people are given, the more stuff they get to fill
it.  But there are so many neat things to decorate a home with!  =)  As I look
around my apartment, I don't see anything that is unnecessary clutter...of
course, I got really picky about necessities while living in a tiny dorm room.
<shrug>

Let's see now...

1.  The kids have to have their own rooms.
2.  The parents need at least one office room.
3.  We need a big kitchen to eat in.
4.  Give up the dining room????!!!!!  What if we entertain?
5.  The living room in the old house was *so* cramped!  Only one couch would
fit!
6.  Isn't this basement rec room great?  It was just storage before.
7.  (sigh) this waiting-for-the-bathroom business can't continue.  We need
more bathrooms in our next house.

So what have I missed?

I think you have missed linking this to dwellings.  This is fun!

I would love to walk to work. To have computers that did not require furnature
and bookshelves. Oh my, How the TV shapes a room. I would love to share a
darkroom (as I bite my thumb and wonder who will empty the bottles of color
chemicals five years out of date.) But then the honeycombs of Tokyo look so
dreary as the choice.

Where's George Carlin to comment on this?!  ;-)

I've been generally planning to put more shelves in all the closets,
and contemplating how it would look to have shelves on all the walls near
the ceiling (like in restaurants with rustic flavors)...but already fear
that those yards of new shelf space would not begin to solve the problem.
After all, the stuff is already piled two-shelves high on the single shelves!
THEN, there is the basement, with the floor covered two shelves high....

Shelving takes up space that you could be piling things in, and it has to be
really strong if you want to stack a whole lot of stuff on it, which means
it has to be thicker.  The standard shelving is not deep enough for the really
useful items.  I have a wall 6' long, floor to ceiling, stacked with milk
crates acquired on my travels.  Some are even bilingual.  This is espeically
handy for storing old tool and electronics and car-parts catalogs.

But the milk crates are not deep enough for equipment and projects.  So I
built some really strong shelving out in the garage, but there's so much stuff
stacked in front of it (like a car project) that I can't get at the shelves.

i have the wonderful dilemma of being a pack rat. i harldy have any room in
my house for my stuff, and its aggrivating, but i cant seem to throw away
ssomething i havent used in a long time because it "might" have a use again.
and i cant afford to buy a new one (whatever it may be) if i do need it again.

I like shelving.  There's a lot of stuff that I have that either doesn't stack
well, or needs to be more accessable than stacking makes it.  It either goes
on shelves, or gets spread out all over the floor.  Since I like having floor
space, shelves are much better.

I grew up in a really big house.  It was really nice because even if there
were lots of people over, there was always somewhere to go hide and get away
from it.  When I first moved out of my parents' house, I had a one bedroom
apartment that seemed like way more space than I really needed.  After a while
it started feeling like I needed more space, but not so much as a place to
put stuff, but in terms of better separation so that I could get the home
office out of the middle of the living room.  Now I've got a fairly big two
bedroom apartment, which at some times still seems bigger than I need, but
as I accumulate more stuff it can start feeling a little small at times too.

I have a really hard time throwing anything away.  I'll probably keep
expanding my needed space forever, or something like that.

Affluenza is a major problem in our society.  People want it more of it bigger
and sooner.  Why have one phone line when you can have two?  Does that
simplify things?  It's not convenient to go to the den every time you want
to watch tv, so now you need two more in other parts of the house.  Cars? 
Gotta have at least two, preferably three.  We're buying too much and getting
too much, and it's not making us happy. It's ridiculous.  I'm as bad as the
next person, too.  

While we're at it, I'm busy trying to make an organization system to hold my
rapidly increasing collections of CDs and videos.  It's getting crowded in
my basement (which is finished).

I do a fair bit of my work at home, and there are often times when I need to
be on the phone and on the Net at the same time.  If I didn't have multiple
phone lines, I would be spending a lot more time driving back and forth
between Ann Arbor and Livonia.  I'm often tempted to get a third phone line
put in.

        I have to store my CDs deep on the shelves.  There's these plastic
bin boxes I found that are about the width of the front of the CD and
hold about a foot of CDs.  Four of this brand fit within those Hirsch
metal shelves.  Being able to view the CD collection face on is one
of the best solutions for me.  The width of the CD to the wall just
wastes to much space to me, it makes more sense to use up about 12 inches
away from the wall, like I do for LPs.

I have wall to wall, floor to ceiling, on top of and under everything stuff!
I am continuously getting rid of stuffbut the piles never seem to diminish...I
am building an addition to spread all my stuff in so that I have room to
change my clothes and walk forward or backward instead of sideways...and I
have not been aquiring any new stuff...go figure...

I'm infamous for shoving everything under my bed.  =)  I also happen to be
one of few who don't arrange the furniture in the living room to make it a
shrine to the TV.  Milk crates are great for storage because they're sturdy
and have handles, but gone are the days I used them as furniture...

I'm not sure my living room has enough in it to be considered a shrine to
anything.  Sure the couch faces the TV, but what else is there for it to face?
(living room furniture is one thing I hvaen't been accumulating all that
fast).

When I moved out of my room at my parents' house all my years of accumulations
of stuff under my bed were mixed with an inch thick layer of dust.  That was
enough to convince me that under the bed was a bad storage place.

Houses you talk about do more than $ 400 000 here in Amsterdam, only available
to the wealthy of Holland.

A decent, average apartment in Amsterdam measures about 60 square meters, but
many older ones are way way smaller than that.
But,. as Boucker and White mentioned in their book the Undutchables: they live
in teeny, scrawny little flats crammed with stuff.
Btw, the floor surface room is measured by the rooms, not the kitchens,
bathrooms and toilet or halls. So, in fact an aprtment may be a little larger
than pictured above.
Now I am going to move from my bachelor flat to a larger bachelor flat I have
found myself surprised how much even I have got, and this while I always
maintained I am no materialist.

This item now linked to Dwellings.

Our house is a ranch, with a full walk-out basement, and has just under
1,000 sq. ft. of "living space" (The upstairs.) It is very well designed!
I have been in many a 2,000+ sq. ft. new construction that feels smaller.
It helped to knock out the wall between the dining room and living room
as well as opening the pass-through window in the kitcken.  It helped to
pull up the dark wall-to-wall carpeting and have the old oak floor
refinished as well as knocking down the silly partition in the entry way.
I have built a *lot* of shelves everywhere and put a floor in the atic
of the single car attached garage.  I, too, am a pack-rat.  The Co. I
work for just closed up a building and tossed several *tons* of good
stuff.  This country is too rich! I picked up a small fraction of it...

Re:  #20
60 sq. meters comes to about 646 sq. feet.  Since the kitchen, bath, hall,
and (presumably) walls are *in addition* to that, i'd guess that you'd
wind up with the equivalent of 900-1000 sq. feet as measured over here.

Oh, dear. I've given away trashbagfuls of clothes to charity, my closet is
still more packed than I'd like. (And I need to shop this weekend for a winter
dress, I have none). I gave away a ton of CDs to the local library, and still
go nuts trying to pick them for my CD player.

I love perfume. I gave away several bottles to friends, and still have about
eight left. It will take me 2,000 years to use them all up, and for awhile now
I've wanted to have a signature scent. So I still have to alternate. 

Agggh. I keep wanting to live simply and I keep adding stuff. And I want more
shelves. My one bedroom place doesn't have enough room.

Give 40% of your income to charity.  After paying the rent, etc. you will
have a hard time accumulating loads of stuff on what's left.   :)

You don't need more closets.  Just install katy's backpack into the wall :)

If I gave 40% of my income to charity, I wouldn't be able to pay my rent. 
I'll stick with closets...  =)

I already give more than 40% of my income to charity -- the government.

So you need another job to give 40%?  All the better - less time to 
shop!  ;)

My mother discovered that it is possible to buy rubbermaid containers
which are perhaps 4 inches tall, 2 feet wide and 4 feet long (times
or divide by 1.5; my ability to get measurements right is pretty lame),
and then put books into the containers and store them underneath the bed.
That way, the dust lands on the plastic cover.

The plastic is probably not strong enough for the containers to be safely
lifted off the floor when they are full of books, but it works fine to slide
them along the floor.

If you store a lot of things under the bed during humid weather, you run the
risk of the bed starting to smell mildewed.

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