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Also, my otherwise very fit and trim Mom, who power walked three to four miles a day at least, had a sudden and incapacitating stroke at age 63. Suddenly, she could no longer navigate stairs due to balance and vision issues. Game changer. (She also could suddenly no longer ever drive again.)
So in response to the OP's question - regardless of whether or not a home looks more grand or aesthetically pleasing as a two story, sometimes a two story home simply isn't practical. And there are many, many one story homes that are beautiful anyway.
Quoted for truth. Use it or lose it. Nothing wrong with getting a single story if you need it. If you find yourself with balance problems or some other disability, by all means find the right type of housing, but to dismiss stairs simply based on the prospect of some future disability caused by a willful neglect of your basic physical aptitude is engineering for obsolecence of your own body.
"Willful neglect"? Check back here in the case that you have to reconfigure your house or sell sooner than you wanted because even someone as healthy as yourself (or your spouse) can't do stairs an longer - due to non-willful accident, illness, etc. Spoken like someone who has never experienced or known anyone who didn't willfully have health issues. Luckily I have many ways to stay fit - those who rely solely on going up and down their own stairs at home might be rudely awakened someday.
But not having to worry about losing money on a sale is just one of many reasons I prefer a one-level home.
I agree with all of this. I have actually never lived in a one-story house in my life, and I'm 48. I don't mind going up and down; I never think about it, I just do it as I always have done. I work at home, too, so I'm sure I go up and down at least 15-20 times per day.
My grandmother (lived to 97) and dad (now 93) lived in second-floor walk-ups until their late 80s. A close family friend lived to 100 and climbed those stairs every day until one month before she died. I can't help but think that stairs were an important part of the healthy lifestyles of these folks.
I live in a part of SoCal where lots are small, and most houses are two-story. If you insist on one story in my town, it's going to be tiny. I like the extra space, and I also like "going up to bed." If I get to where I can't climb stairs, so be it, but I'm not assuming it's going to happen any time soon.
Yep, that's what I thought too - and then suddenly I had to have two ankle surgeries back to back at age 50 and 52. Yeah, that sucked. Thank goodness I didn't have to go "up to bed" because navigating the two or three stairs into my work place was hard enough. Honestly, a flight of stairs would have been flat out dangerous to me, and I wasn't old OR decrepit or overweight or lazy.
You bring up another good point though about lot size and house size. Around here in northeast Texas, the overwhelming preference for houses is one story, or at least a house with a comfortable bedroom and full bath downstairs. Like many other parts of the country, we have larger lots and larger homes and reasonable housing prices, so we don't have to worry about a one story home being "tiny." My previous one story home was 2500 square feet on a one acre lot and we sold it a couple of years ago for about $260,000. Now, we moved to a slightly more expensive area so that same house here would probably go for about $300,000 but that's still not too bad for a spacious new home and good floor plan on an acre lot.
I get that for some people stairs can become a burden and for any of us it could become so because of an injury but come on it seems like half the people over 50 here are borderline terrified of the simple act of going up and down stairs. Folks have been doing it well into their 90s for millennia and are all the healthier and stronger because of it. When did we become so frail and weak that the rest of us can’t even climb stairs?
I’m 56 and make it a point to go up at least 20 flights of stairs a day (or its equivalent by power walking up hills). There will be a time when I can’t go up stairs, it may be tomorrow, but I’m certainly not going to hasten that time but simply being lazy to the act of doing so today.
I love having the bulk of our living space on one floor and a suite of rooms on another, gives a great separation in a compact house on a small lot and makes it feel larger.
When I had to have my Achilles tendon surgeries, I joined an online support group for other people who have had the same sorts of surgery, injuries, etc. Many of these people were young and very athletic. They were from all over the world. I can't tell you how many young people I talked with who described the difficulties of navigating stairs with a jacked up leg for months on end. Many of them resorted to either sleeping downstairs on a sofa and trying to use a half bath to sort of wash up, or they went up the stairs on their hands and knees and down the stairs on their butts. For months. Yikes!
but to dismiss stairs simply based on the prospect of some future disability caused by a willful neglect of your basic physical aptitude is engineering for obsolecence of your own body.
Really There are many people who have/had problems with stairs due to things that were not because of willful neglect.
Folks have been doing it well into their 90s for millennia and are all the healthier and stronger because of it.
One reason is folks have not been living well into their 90s for millennia. A thousand years ago the average life span was about 30 years. It's only a recent phenomenon that people need to adjust their lifestyles to accommodate a long period (often a few decades) where their body is slowly declining and cannot handle certain things anymore.
Our retirement house incorporates the best of both worlds. We bought a one story house, but it also has a FROG (a large room with a bathroom over the garage). The frog can function as an upstairs bedroom until we reach a point where we would rather sleep downstairs. For now, we prefer to sleep upstairs. It's nice in the winter because warm air rises and we like the view from the window. But when the time comes to sleep downstairs it's nice to know we have everything we need on the main floor.
You bring up another good point though about lot size and house size. Around here in northeast Texas, the overwhelming preference for houses is one story, or at least a house with a comfortable bedroom and full bath downstairs. Like many other parts of the country, we have larger lots and larger homes and reasonable housing prices, so we don't have to worry about a one story home being "tiny."
Yes, this makes a big difference. The one-story houses in my neighborhood are two bedrooms, 1000 square feet, and they did not build many of them. I'd say 85% of the houses are two stories. So, saying I like stairs is to some extent making a virtue of necessity. No one wants to cram a family of five into two bedrooms.
On the other hand, the obesity rate in Texas, the land of the large one-story house, is 31.9%, and here in California "only" 24.7%. So maybe all those stairs are making a tiny bit of difference.
We currently live in a 1 story house, lived in a 2 story prior to this. I prefer the 1 story. I don't like stairs, I think it's safer for the dogs and kid without stairs.
Biggest reason why I prefer the 1 story is for temperature regulation. We lived in El Paso, TX in the 2 story house. It gets very hot there. We found that it was just too warm upstairs. Some houses got around this with 2 heating/cooling/thermostat units. However, that's an additional cost not just for installing the unit but also to run it, maintain and repair it.
Quoted for truth. Use it or lose it. Nothing wrong with getting a single story if you need it. If you find yourself with balance problems or some other disability, by all means find the right type of housing, but to dismiss stairs simply based on the prospect of some future disability caused by a willful neglect of your basic physical aptitude is engineering for obsolecence of your own body.
Not accounting for sudden disability though is also shortsighted.
I was a passenger in a car that exploded and burned down almost taking me with it. One ankle was almost completely burned through and I spent 6 months in a wheel chair recovering. Couldn't do stairs at all. And now, since that ankle doesn't work properly (when I raise my foot it tends to droop at the toes a bit) I find that lifting my foot for a stair step can cause me to trip on it and cause a fall. Not something I want to do on a stair. Had nothing to do with being obese or out of shape or not having a healthy lifestyle. And of course, we have older dogs that can't navigate stairs anymore. I try to carry them, (they are Scottish terriers so not very big) but I don't want to trip and fall while doing so. That would be bad. So yeah, my next house will probably be a one story home so that there will be no problems as I get older.
Also, shouldn't we be choosing our homes on being comfortable and not based on how hard we can make it on ourselves just to impress some young person on the internet?
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Luckily I have many ways to stay fit - those who rely solely on going up and down their own stairs at home might be rudely awakened someday.
