Fair - my woodwork and brewing stuff is in the garage (I tend to use the drive a lot if weather permits) and tbf a LOT of wall space is covered in books!
Space is one of the reasons I don’t own a lot of games but I think that is possibly a good thing!
Ah. I was speculating that you were referring to New Zealand, but I couldn’t make the numbers match either the North Island (just under 3.9 million inhabitants) or the South Island (1.2 million inhabitants). Wikipedia puts Hawke’s Bay on the North Island, but it also says that the North Island is just under 114,000 square km; the 50 km by 40 km you mention would come to only 2000 square km if it were a perfect rectangle, a tiny fraction of the actual area. So I was puzzled.
I enjoy mowing much more now that I have big headphones.
C and I suffer from that as well: we have 11 shelves of books (and one of DVDs), plus the odd boxes of CDs, vinyl, and comics (the graphic novels are on shelves, but shelves don’t work for comics), plus (currently) 35 pieces of art on the walls. One bedroom serves as my office and another as Carol’s studio. C’s computer is on a drafting table in the living room (the monitor doubles as entertainment, being hooked up to a Blu-Ray player) and mine is on a desk in my office. We could not fit in a significant number of board games, and we really don’t have a surface we could play them on. (I suppose we could improvise with a couple of TV trays.)
Shopping for furniture this last time was frustrating. I had taken it for granted that we would be able to buy shelves three feet wide and six high, and a desk with built in shelves, like the one’s we’d disposed of in Riverside as too beat up to move; both items proved to be really hard to find, even when we were able to visit Nebraska Furniture, a huge outlet. Apparently the culture of domestic furniture has changed while we weren’t watching.
The sqft thing is a hangover from when we bought the house. I calculated it for… I don’t know but I was looking at the plan and it had measurements so I did it.
The fact I remember it is weird. I usually call my house a three double bedroom house when it’s relevant.
Yeah I have no idea of the square footage and can’t find it listed in the documentation.
American listings for real estate purchases or rentals seem fairly consistently to specify square footage, though I’m not sure there’s an official standard way of calculating it. When my father-in-law’s house went on the market, for example, Zillow specified that it had 1381 square feet. I wonder if you would find a square footage if you entered your address into Zillow?
Here, listings generally show individual room size in metre squared, so it’s can be calculated, but I’ve never seen it as an overall measurement. Listings often won’t include dimensions of hallways and other non-rooms.
EDIT: found the overall size by checking the zooplas of neighbours. My house is 940 sq ft which is fairly typical of the upper end of the mid-size terrace housing in my area. I have 2 bedrooms and a box room, the smaller nearby houses are lacking the box room (so probably more like 900-920sq ft?). The house is ~£230-250k, so Londoners say it’s cheap and locals say it’s London prices.
I definitely could do with a room or two extra. Would love to not store my guitar stuff in the guest bedroom!
That’s very close to the 890 square feet of our current place. The previous one was 1040 square feet (the Web site says) but it actually felt less roomy. Part of that might have been the alcove for a washer and drier; our current place has a small laundry room downstairs with coin-operated machines, which somewhat compensates for the lower rent.
My father-in-law’s house probably started out the same size in the 1950s, when he bought it, before they turned the back porch into an add-on. That seems awfully cramped for raising three children, but American expectations for space have risen over the decades.
I’m just amazed whenever I see a house big enough that the furniture isn’t pushed to the walls. A sofa in the middle of the room!? The extravagance!
“…you know, you could fit a really nice gaming table in here…”
I’m in the US. My house (owned by my in-laws from whom we rent) is about 1000 sq. ft. with a solid American suburban yard. It’s a nice house for my husband and I. Three small bedrooms - one we use as a bedroom, one we use as a shared computer room, and one we use as a game room. The people who lived here in the 1960s-1970s raised three children here and that I cannot imagine. As others have mentioned, changing notions of size and space sine then.
Living inside the Washington DC beltway, it’s easy to vomit when talking about housing prices. But on the other hand, you live here because the salaries are higher too. It’s all a self balancing system. They pay you an obscene amount, they demand an obscene amount in living expenses, and you’re right back where you started.
We’ve managed a 2,300 sqft (260 sq m) home with a bit of grass and consider ourselves blessed.
Thats where you want a remote job for an organisation based in an expensive part of the world and you live in backsville!
Remote work has, to some degree, complicated the issue.
I live in one of the most affordable cities in the country, and my remote work position pays significantly higher salaries than comparable work here where I live.
It’s a new world. That has certainly been on our minds.
I listened to this today… Will Work-from-Home Work Forever? (Ep. 464) - Freakonomics Freakonomics
The US Patent office has been doing WFH for a decade-ish now with no scaling for salaries, whereas Facebook will scale the salary depending on local factors.
The other city C and I looked at, besides Lawrence, was Boise. But C was watching the real estate prices, and they were trending steadily upward as Californias moved there, and took the money from selling their California houses to invest in Boise houses. We picked Lawrence partly because few Californians think of moving to Kansas.
My in-laws are from Wisconsin. Way back when, when my wife was 4, so the late 80s, my father-in-law’s position got moved from Michigan (where they had been living for just a couple of years at the time) to Kansas City. He said when he was told that, he stopped what he was doing and asked (presumably his boss), “Where’s that?”
To be fair, you’d never guess “Missouri.”