How much room do we really need? + straw bale houses

Sorry for the end thread but I didn't want to get the other one off topic!

We want to be back in our own home asap and I've been thinking about where I want to live long term, the size etc.

So DH would be happy with the huge mc mansion box in the 'burbs but the more I think about it the more I don't like the idea of it.

We've been there, done that. We built and lived in a box in a street with other boxes...boring!

I thought of kit homes on a little bit of land but now I'm not really liking that either.

I've always loved the idea of sustainable living and particularly straw bale houses. But for them to be cost effective and truly sustainable they need to be on the smaller size.

Anyway my point.....how much room do we really need? And how do you convince your partner that the size of your house isn't an indication of success or worth?

We've lived in HUGE houses and it's probably the most miserable we've been.

Is smaller more homely? Do we really need a formal 'dinning' as well as somewhere to eat?

I'm so confused, I keep looking at houses and they are lovely but then I think about how much it would cost to cool/heat, lighting etc?

I don't think this has many any sense! *crawls back to my corner*

I think the answer lies in the clever design, so you don't end up with any 'dead space'. That way you can your square metres into having larger single rooms, rather than having multiple rooms spread out all over the place. eg, one decent size kitchen/family room that you can move your furniture around in as you need to is worth more in my mind than a small kitchen and a small dining room that's only big enough to fit a table into, kwim?

Our house was built in 1974, and the entire entrance room/hallway is a complete waste of space, it's not the right shape or size to be used for anything other than walking from room to room. I compare that with the townhouse my sister bought recently, and that had a wider hallway, which had functional storage, bookshelves, a study/workspace, and a laundry (in a cupboard - but quite large) so that every bit of wall/floor was actually functional. Having said that, ours is the good old L-shaped lounge/dining area, with an open plan kitchen and we live and entertain quite adequately in that space, even if I do find myself wishign some times that they had built the room just 1 metre longer (to allow for more storage space...oh for a buffet LOL).

i agree with MaryDean, i think it's about what kind of space you have, rather than how much? If you utilise everything well, then you could probably afford to have a smaller house than if you have a massive house with just heaps of useless square metres all over the place.

i personally love the idea of straw bale houses, DH and i one day would love to have a little bit of acreage and build our own place, that would be awesome :)

We are going through same thing at the moment, trying to design a strawbale house that is liveable, but not too huge. Lived in bigger homes, more to heat and more to clean.

We won't be having a formal dining or formal living room, just an open plan kitchen/living/dining area. The dining table will be huge, but will also serve as an every day table for cooking, projects etc We may have some bar stool at a kitchen bench, but we feel no need for a separate breakfast table etc. Don't see the need for parents' retreat, we will just make our bedroom that bit bigger if we feel the need to have a quiet corner to ourselves. Actually same with the girl's bedrooms, they will have room to move in there, not into tiny bedrooms and then having multiple rumpus rooms/kids retreats instead.

Some friends of ours have what we call the McMansion from hell. It takes longer to sweep the main living room than what it does to sweep my current lounge and kitchen, along with mopping the kitchen floor.

Our place in Brisbane was stupidly HUGE!

I remember our eyes lit up at all the space but after living in it for 12months I couldn't wait to leave.

4brds, study, formal lounge, formal dining, kitchen, meals, family, rumpus, OMG it was stupid!

I like the idea of bigger bedrooms so everyone has their own space!

I think if you have suffiencent storage space, then you're okay. We have an 18 square house, 4 of that is garage. We don't really have anything here we don't use, and we're bursting at the seams. We have one double cupboard that was half shelved and half for brooms - we ended up shelving the entire thing just for some extra linen space. We don't have a lot of everything, but towels and things are bulky! Our kitchen is too small - no cupboards, just drawers, it looks great, but is useless for people like us who enjoy cooking and have a range of things for it. Our house doesn't look cluttered, but we do need the extra space because to get what I need from a cupboard, I need to pull everything out, find what I need, then put it all back. Our next house (we've already picked it) is 24 squares, with plenty of storage, and we believe it will be our "forever" house.

On your bigger bedroom idea, go for two double wardrobes. We had that in the house I grew up in and it was fantastic. Plenty of room for clothes on one side, and things like books, drawers, school bags, school stuff etc in the other side. Makes the bedrooms look large and open and not cluttered. My cousin did this and she even put in a power point in the wardrobe so her tv could go in there.

When we moved down here we rented the typical 80's build (the precursor to the McMansion). 3 bed, 2 living, 2 bath, lots of wardrobes. I found it too big, well overall size was fine, just the rooms did not work. 2 living areas does not work with us, I thought it would, but sadly it did not. The walk-in robe the main bedroom was useless. There were cupboards everywhere, even the full length of the hallway, which I thought be great, as I assumed if everything was easy to get at that I would use things. I was wrong there as well, yes storage in bedrooms,kitchen and laundry is a must, but honestly the rest just needs to be stored properly in the shed.

Do you know, if you had posed this question 12months ago, I would have said I couldn't possibly downsize any further than my beautiful new spacious house.....then I packed up my life and lived out of two standard suitcases for the four of us for 3+ months. We lived in a tiny two bedroom unit (main room with living, kitchen and dining, two bedrooms and a combined bathroom and laundry) with very basic home furnishings. At the end of it, I could have easily continued to live there. Granted a few more of our own things would have been needed (like toys/children's stuff and a proper lounge lol), but we would have managed just fine.
When we did get our stuff out of storage and moved into a proper house it was much smaller than our previous house (company allocated). It just made us realise how much superfluous stuff we carry around in our lives.

We're living in a 110sqm house and it is, undeniably, Way Too Small. One bathroom (with toilet in it) and 3 kids, one of whom is an angsty tween and needs her own space, a toddler and a baby who wakes up several times a night to eat - can't let the kids share or the toddler would destroy the tween's ipod dock/laptop/keyboard/lego/craft makings. Yay modern trimmings.

The house we are building is one of those floorplans with absolutely no dead space. 140sqm, 4 bedrooms, two bathrooms (one is our ensuite), and a second living area right at the front for us to operate a home business from without needing to walk customers through the entire toy-infested mess to our study-in-the-kitchen right at the back of the house. Its the bare minimum we need to live comfortably without sardining, and leaves us with a decent amount of backyard too. I am really, really looking forward to it :)

We are building a strawbale house at the moment on a couple of acres. We only have one child and no plans for more. It will have 184 sqm but that includes the verandah, and the second floor have a roof that goes to a peak so we can't stand up at the sides. So it is going to be pretty small (but we live in a caravan now!). But we can build on later if we want and this way we won't be in any debt. We are building it as much as we can ourselves as it makes it so so much cheaper. Our solar set up is in (an external building) and DH is about to start drilling the holes into the ground for the posts so we are really at the beginning of building. We are hoping it will be done within a year. HTH.

A lot of sustainability can be gained in design. Things like passive solar design, collecting rainwater and reusing grey water, having a vege garden and compost.
Strawbale is a great insulating material so it will cut down your power costs in summer and winter. If you use it as infill rather than load bearing you can have a much larger design.
You can also look towards non-Western and traditional design for sustainability. The Japanese system of sliding paper doors is fantastic. You can reduce space in winter and create cells of warmth rather than heating a whole house and in summer open the spaces to so that breezes flow through. Huge glass windows are a massive drain on resources because they create such an efficient energy exchange. Shutters don't take much to install and if you pull them closed over night in winter and when the sun is shining on your windows in summer they make a huge difference in heat loss/gain. Mexican and North-African designs often translate really well to our climate.

One thing that I do is when I see an idea or feature that I like I take a photo of it on my phone so I remember it. I have a file on my computer for photos and links of stuff I like.

Will be going for shutters in the new house. As much as I love textiles, I am not into curtains. As the windows in strawbale are quite deep, we will put in shutters that will fold neatly against the sides of the window recess.

Have the ideas/wish folder here as well and DH is the one taking pics with his phone when out and about.

Still trying to work out designs here, but what seems to be sticking is a house in 2 parts. The main with the living areas, our bedroom and bathroom. Then a secondary wing with the girls rooms, guest room and bathroom. Well the guest room may go in the main part, as it will let us build the bulk of the house, move in with the girls in the guest room and then build the other wing. We mainly want the second wing as it will be able to be shut off when not in use. So if the girls are not around, or when they move out, then we just shut the door and not have to heat or cool that area (not that it would be much of an issue with strawbale)

I second the comments about storage. One house we lived in had a *fantastic* laundry. It was attached to the main house but you walked two steps out the back door to go into it (so you could access it directly from the back yard too). It was large enough to have washing machine, dryer, deep freeze & a work bench on one wall, and the opposite wall was full of fantastic cupboards!!! Much tidier, less dusty etc than keeping things in the shed. We could also probably have rigged up some clever drying racks etc for when the weather was bad but we weren't there long enough (sadly, it was a great house). I loved that laundry and have since dreamed about building one onto this house

Interesting article today:
Room to move, but is a bigger home better? | victoria

Thanks Astrid, it was an interesting read.

I think for me its about keeping overall costs down, plus on going costs (repairs, heating, cooling, etc) and also wanting to be more sustainable.

I really like the idea of having as little as possible "dead space". I also don't want all this extra space I have to clean.

I'm currently just collecting as much info as possible about the best building materials, heating/cooling and so on.

I've found it very hard to find the real environmental cost of things, some things seem sustainable on the surface but when you look a little deeper into what they are made of they aren't really that good.