“With a growing family, we need a bigger house.” Can’t tell you how many times I hear this from mid-career professionals, occupying renovated three + bedroom houses in my suburban community of Weston. Among their chronological peers, these are the ones who’ve hit the jackpot. They managed to sneak into a housing market that is out of reach for many, and they’ve done it in a community that provides sizeable yards, walkable streets, playgrounds galore, and the Humber River trail a 10 minute walk away. They’re living large and yet even they want to live larger, like their parents were able to. 

While it’s fashionable to blame everything on millennials, this compulsion to live in a big house is more universal. The household I had with Jack wasn’t growing, but he too thought we needed a bigger house. That house - now rented out to a family of four - has three bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a finished basement. Jack, though, was fixated on where we could add on - dreaming at various times of replacing the back porch with a breakfast bar or enclosing the front porch, with each reno adding a main floor powder room, or building a balcony off our bedroom. I didn’t understand it. Previous owners raised three kids in that house so there was certainly lots of space for two. Indeed, we spent many evenings on separate floors, him in his Neflix-and-smoking chamber and me at my computer two floors above, communicating as needed by telephone. 

He and his two sisters had been raised in a two bedroom apartment in a Soviet-style five storey walk-up apartment block in a small city in Poland. As a family, they’d negotiated flexi-space - a living room that doubled as a dining room and tripled as their parents’ bedroom; bedrooms that slept different combinations of kids at different time; a juliet balcony that was also the clothesline; a bathroom that accommodated the washer/dryer. And so on. Yet while Jack and I often went weeks - especially in the summer - without using our living room at all, favouring instead to sit outside in the evenings, this notion that our house should be bigger preoccupied him until his death. 

You might think that Jack’s need for more space was prompted by feeling cramped in his youth, but I too lived small as a child, yet don’t have the same expansionist urge. 

We deduced that our farmhouse was built in the late 1880s when we found a newspaper article about Louis Riel stuffed in a wall. It was not the grand farmhouse that many think of when imagining idyllic country life — more Green Acres than Anne of Green Gables. When my parents moved in with their then-four kids, Dad enclosed the upstairs landing to create a fourth bedroom. When I was born the next year, my crib was shoehorned into a walk-in closet next to my parents’ room. The only advantage to sleeping there was its proximity to the sole vent on the second floor, through which a little heat rose from the oil-burning furnace in the unfinished cellar two storeys down. Having no window and being located between two bedrooms meant my closet arrangement was the warmest in the place. But it was, nonetheless, still a closet, big enough for a crib but not a bed and so there I slept until I was four when a sister moved out and I assumed her space sharing with another sister 10 years my senior. Worth noting too we all used one bathroom for many years. (10 years into living there, Dad built an addition that accommodated his workshop and a second bathroom) I’d guess that house would be about a 25 ft x25 ft footprint. The bedrooms all had ceilings so sloped you could lie in bed and trace your finger on the patterned wallpaper overhead. We didn’t spend a lot of time upstairs, favouring instead sitting around together in a largish kitchen with its adjoining den silently listening to CBC radio and reading or occasionally playing Scrabble. We reserved the “front room” for Christmas, playing the piano, and entertaining the very occasional guests. We did not feel space-deprived. It was just normal life. 

So why does it seem that everyone so much space? Is it all just about conspicuous consumption — if I can afford to live this way, others can conclude I’m rich? Or having all an abundance of space allows me to fill it with the trappings of my consumerist life? Or does having separate space for each activity provide the luxury of never having to put anything away? Or do I feel so ineffectual and small in my public life that I want to sprawl in my private life like a man’s knees encroaching beyond the width of his subway car seat? 

A year ago I moved into my laneway suite and I have never felt richer. I think it’s because of my small space. I feel lighter with fewer things to keep track of. I have fewer choices to make throughout my day about where I’m going to sit or how I’m going to occupy myself. I feel less wasteful during a time when space is increasingly at a premium. My utility costs are down. I can’t make impulse purchases because I have no space to put stuff. I recycle or share magazines more quickly to reduce clutter. And so on. 

So if you’re feeling like society thinks your house is a ‘starter home,’ please think about making a statement with smaller living. Kids will not die from sharing, you’ll save money, and you will be happier. Trust me.  

(above - my recent return to that farmhouse in Huron County where I learned how to live small; below left - I enjoy my 11x13 foot upstairs office-by-day, lounge-by-night; below right - the farm in 1985 when we sold it)

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