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"Tiny" is funny The house I bought in 1990 is 1448 sq ft and we're good with the size. We do have a full attic, basement and detached oversized garage. Personally I think I could do from a bit smaller to maybe a little over 2000 sq ft for both of us.
I like what another poster said about not being able to hear each other with a larger house when you need to be alone.
What we both want is land and outbuildings. So our next (and hopefully last) place will be in a lower COL area. House size not as important but acreage and outbuildings are. Not sure we can do tiny house though - i.e. 500-800 sq ft or less.
This^^. We are up-sizing our land, building a new house the same size as what we have, and adding a large heated outbuilding. One thing about living in cold country is to have a large enough sized house to move around in and change environments without feeling claustrophobic when it's too blustery to go outside. When we do go outside then, we have lots of things to do, but if not, we're happy sitting by a fire, or working on some craft somewhere in the house.
I for once would love to have a home that is 1800 + sq ft and large yard.. My husband said we don't need all that, but this is basicly our last home and would love to have more space
We aren't retired yet, but we are in our 50s and looking into it. The way I see it, as long as I can afford someone to clean my house and do my yard, I can do what I want.
That said, sometimes my cleaning lady can't make it and sometimes the yard man is overbooked. We still maintain our pool ourselves. This 1800sqft 3br home with finished 700sqft basement is getting to be too much for us to deal with and I'll be damned if we call our kids to help us; they have their own lives to live.
So we are considering downsizing if we ever do leave.
Yup...no regrets! I moved from a 1 story contemporary to a 2 story 1886 farmhouse on 3 acres. I get a kick out of saying" I'm going upstairs" and I never dreamed I'd live on a property big enough for 2 horses to hide...lol. I love my house..its very different than growing up in NYC or south Florida as an adult...coming from NY I thought fl was the country!!!!
We're doing this now. We retired at 50, remodeled our forever home (1800 sq ft), then sold it a few years later to move to a larger (3000 sq ft) three story house. Now we're tired of the beach life of postage stamp size lot and tall skinny house. Now we want a single story (5000 sq ft) on about 1/2 acre lot, can't get that at the beach, we are moving inland.
Don't know if we'll stay in it forever, but we are choosing a house that will continue to be livable as we age and have space for a live-in if we choose to have one in the future.
We intended to downsize in retirement to make our life simpler, but it didn't turn out that way.
We had had a relatively high-maintenance, fully custom 5300sf multi-story home with an 1800sf garage/shop on about 1.5 acres in the foothills above Silicon Valley. In retirement we thought we wanted low-maintenance, lock-and-leave living --
-- so we bought a 3300sf condo in with a 4 car private garage & elevator that went directly from our garage into the condo--
-- but we discovered it wasn't all it was cracked up to be. So we built a custom 7700-ish sf home with an 1100 sf garage/shop.
For a vacation home, we started with a 1300sf 3bd/2ba condo, but it was too small, so now we have a 3300-ish sf home, and Mrs. SportyandMisty wants to upsize to have a much larger entertaining space.
Our current house is a 3200 sq. ft ranch with 5 BRs and 2.5 Baths on 1 A of land adjacent to 70+A wood.
We would like to move to a newer single level house with <2000 sq. ft, 3BRs/2 Baths on at least 1A lot but have had a terrible time finding such a home in several possible relocation areas (Vancouver WA suburbs, Spokane WA and Boise/Nampa ID).
All the newer homes with acreage and nice views (mountains, river, lake) are quite big with 4-5 BRs, 3-4 baths and 3-6K sq. ft.
The only way to get a newer home <2000 sq. ft is to buy a lot and has one built However, nice lots with mature trees within 30 minutes drive to a decent size city/town are also next to impossible to find. In addition, some cities put a lot of restrictions on new build homes (lot size, water, sewage permits etc).
We are still looking and may end up having to buy a house much bigger than what we need or want.
We have had a horrible time finding new homes (in the areas we want to retire) that are around 2K sq ft. We finally came to terms with <3K being ok.
That's a lot of house to clean.
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We moved from 2800 to 2100. What needed downsizing was our former acreage, down to an average yard. We were fine with the old house, and feel a bit cramped in this one.
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The house I bought in 1990 is 1448 sq ft and we're good with the size. We do have a full attic, basement and detached oversized garage. Personally I think I could do from a bit smaller to maybe a little over 2000 sq ft for both of us.
