[Kermit] Baker says there is less incentive to buy a bigger, more expensive home as the economy weakens, home prices fall and energy costs remain a concern. He says people are less likely to see a home as a good investment.
Even high-end buyers, Baker says, are showing more interest in smaller, better-crafted homes.
“People don’t want to be wasteful,” says JD Callander of Weichert Realtors. She says they are concerned about utility costs and cleaning requirements.
Clients used to like the status of a big home, she says, but “those days are gone.”
And as the boomers get older, those big houses will be shown to be difficult to get around if you have any infirmity, time consuming to care for, expensive to heat and cool and clean. That doesn’t even take the yard into consideration….when I look at the floor plans in Sundays paper, I redesign the big houses into 2 or 3 or even 4 nice units. With no alterations they could be shared homes with separate living spaces and a shared kitchen area. There are master suites that would be a lovely apartment all by themself – the closet alone could be a sleeping space and the master suite bathroom could be refitted to be both kitchen and bath….it amuses me to retool those floor plans.
-Katie in Georgia
Good. McMansions were excessively large even for the majority of people who could afford them.
PS: To take a rather extreme example, a home bought by one friend (who has a family of 5) came with 9 bathrooms. Perfect, perhaps, if cholera strikes while they have company.
McMansions are generally understood to be in the 10,000 sq. ft. range IIRC. And I have always thought they represented the worst in our society. Just wasted space, and a poor use of land…..
Now if they can lower the prices to match the lower square footage.
When we looked for our new home six years ago, we chose a single-level model with only 1,660 square feet for the two of us. We have two bedrooms (1 master BR with bath, and a guest room with bath), great room (kitchen/dining/living room), laundry room, den, and three-car garage on a 1/8 acre lot. Perfect for a retired couple (one of whom is disabled – me).
For the life of me, I cannot understand why a family of five needs a 3,700 sq ft home. It costs a fortune to heat and cool a home like that where we live.
I call developments full of McMansions the “Land of the Giants.”
When I chose the site for our 3,516 log home I made sure it could be oriented so that we would get maximum sun exposure during the winter. I designed the house with large windows on the south and east sides. It is has three floors and 4 ft. wide stairs…so that we can install electric chairs if/when we might need them. The ground level basement and main floor are already wheelchair accessible, the loft needs only the electric chair and it will be also. We built before the U.S. slapped a tax on materials coming out of Canada… Canadians harvest their trees, we let ours burn…thousands of acres at a time. The build was easy, fast, inexpensive because my husband did most of the interior finish work. It is easy to heat; the sun furnishes most of our heat, the wood stove (fire wood is cheap if you cut your own) is centrally located and the stove pipe is 20 ft. high and warm all the way up, the forced air furnace picks up the slack when the wind blows cold and hard.
Why do we need such a big house for two people? Because the two people have 13 kids between them and they do come home, bringing their kids and their grandkids with them. We have had up to 35 people for a holiday meal. The great-grandkids like to come here
because they have a play area in the loft where they can keep tabs on the adults and listen in on their conversations…or just launch paper air planes at them. Would I build the same house again? You bet!
We also have a 3 bedroom, 2 bath modular at the other end of our 20 acres. We lived in it while we built the log home. We use it to offer refuge for neighbors evacuated when our summer forest fires threaten their homes. The guest house is also available for missionaries and other church workers who may be in transition or in need of rest and relaxation.
We aren’t wealthy money-wise; we are both children of the depression. We bake bread, can peaches and pears, dry apples and cranberries, eat a lot of deer and elk, and buy our beef directly from a rancher.
good point #7 that not all circumstances are the same, but i would bet that most people don’t use their gi-normous houses except to store all their stuff. we live in a house that was built 1873 and is quite small with 1 bathroom. i do have about 1/2 acre though in which to plant a garden and hold a chicken coop. mcmansions generally don’t have much yard. i don’t know how one would deal with children without a decent backyard.
in regards to trees and forests, in normal climates forests burn every now and then; it is a healthy part of the ecosystem the burned fragments supply nutrients to the forest floor. now when forests burn it is a tinderbox because of drought. the new trees that are replacing the old are the trees that will thrive in the new climate.
Magnolia,
Not only because of drought, but because of mis-management of forest land, including the prohibition to clear undergrowth that would have (in olden days) been cleared by foraging animals. With the amount of tinder from this undergrowth, fires burn faster and hotter than they normally would.
Frances Scott, you made a wise choice! One good thing about log construction is that the logs themselves are self-insulating and the interlocking construction is pretty much earthquake proof. We would’ve preferred log construction here, but our Building Code doesn’t permit it……darn it!
Another very economical feature of our house is that we have NO drywall! The interior is finished with tongue & groove beetle-kill pine – “blue” pine. True, the walls and ceilings do not reflect a lot of light so there is less light than I would like at night…but at our age an early bed-time makes sense and who needs light while sleeping? Some people think that so much wood might get boring, but the variation in color, growth rings, knot-holes, and wood ant trails gives the eyes a real treat.
Cennydd, thanks for the positive comment, means a lot coming from you. I’m sorry your building code doesn’t allow log homes, you can come enjoy ours anytime you like…so long as our access road is snowed shut!
The biggest fire in our area was started by a female forester who apparently wanted the fame of putting it out. With the growth rate of our predominant trees, Ponderosa, Lodge Pole, Douglas Fir, and
Pinon; it will be a hundred years before the area recovers. Other hazards here are lightning and sheer stupidity…like thinking we could burn the grass out of our empty stock tank, forgetting how quickly the wind can come up and whip a small fire into a huge one. With the help of our volunteer fire deparment, we managed to get the fire under control in about 7 hours. It took two weeks of constant surveillance, any many buckets of water, to damp out all the smoldering pine needle duff. The property shows evidence of the fire that burned through here about a hundred years ago…a few scarred trees, some partially blackened stumps. Ponderosa forests don’t generally burn completely; we have one venerable tree that is 12 ft. in circumference (600 + years old), another that is only 11.5 ft, and a dozen about 9 ft. I’d sure hate to lose any of them!
Our dream home would be a log home, three bd 2 bath with a den/spare room would be perfect.
Oh, to dream.
We live in ranch and farm country, in the western part of the Central Valley. Just to the north of us are the San Luis and Kesterson National Wildlife Refuges, and we are between the Coast and the Sierras. We have a Mediterranean climate, our house is built in the Italian villa style, and we’re situated so as to have a north-to-south orientation……with the prevailing winds from the northwest. Homes here have taken a dive in value, as they have just about everywhere else, but we choose to stay where we are. One benefit from the dive is that people who formerly couldn’t afford to buy a home now CAN, and many of the homes that were vacant are now being sold. The new Federal programs now coming on line should help the situation improve.
This is a great comment thread. I am not convinced about the home heating cost argument against large homes – whatever did humans do a mere century and a half ago? They dressed warmly even indoors, and gathered around fireplaces if necessary. The Vermont Country Store catalogue e.g. offers plenty of solutions to keeping one’s person warm rather than trying to artificially maintain summer temperatures in a large living space through northern winter. Alternative developments such as passive solar, or geothermal heating as President and Mrs. Bush installed on their Crawford property, also substantially offset the cost of fossil fuel heating.
There is one aspect of home ownership not mentioned so far – cleaning! How in the name of heaven does the owner of a home with 9 bathrooms get that job done? The cost of home help may be one factor that drives even people with aspirations back into smaller abodes. I found personally that trying to keep a modest home really clean and tidy while also ‘maintaining’ a full-time working husband and school-age son, as well as working outside my home, leaves no time at all to enjoy or share said clean home; even if I managed to get it presentable, I could only loll around in it from exhaustion……
That said, I think your situation is ideal, Frances. If I could have the help to keep the place up I would do just as you have. Especially in cold climates, what better could one do than be able to offer shelter and sustenance to those they love or to those who can’t maintain it, whether family or friends and neighbors?
There are many, many uses a large home can be put to, and for a start they solve the basic human need for shelter, and go some toward providing food assuming kitchen facilities exist and possibly garden space on a substantial lot. A historic study might show this is what helped many people get through the Depression. One wonders, for example, what produced the transition in so many college towns from large single-family dwellings near the campus to the shared accommodation so many of those homes are now used for.
Whether or not more McMansions are built – and I am not suggesting they are a good idea for just modest sized families – American ingenuity should get to work right away on the many possible uses of existing large houses.
[i]How in the name of heaven does the owner of a home with 9 bathrooms get that job done? [/i]
Shoot, we have two bathrooms and I can’t even get my kids to help clean their bathroom (which they primarily use) and my wife complains the same about me with the “Master bath”!
As for keeping the big house “clean”:
1. Lower your standards! You don’t have to eat off the floor. Many years ago my mother gave me a plaque: “My house is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy!” How I have blessed her for that one through the years.
2. Straighten things up before company, clean house after they leave. That way you only clean once; the energy you save is your own.
3. Clean all the toilets th same day. I have four toilets to clean in the log home, 2 in the guest house. Better to have enough toilets, located where old people and little kids can get to them quickly, than to clean up the messes when they can’t quite make it.
TACit, Right on! The absolute warmest clothes I own are long wool skirts and cotton long-sleeve mocks. Depending on the temperature, I can wear cotton or silk leggings and/or merino wool knee socks, and long or short no sleeves under my shirt. Wool or down vests, or wool shirts or sweaters come and go as the temperature varies during the day. Leather moccasins or bare feet do for most days; if the wood floors are too cold I wear sheepskin slippers. Feather comforters eliminate the need for running the furnace at night.
A big “cold room” in the basement, insulated from the rest of the house, keeps canned goods, staples, root vegetable, butter and eggs fresh for months and eliminates trips to the grocery store. We shop when we are in town for other reasons…or on the way home from church.
One of the things my wife and enjoy the most is to put on sweaters, sweats, and jeans, make plenty of hot chocolate, and sit in front of our fireplace (gas log……remember, we live in the Central Valley), turn on the boob tube, and get comfy on a cold winter’s night with a good movie…..and believe me, it DOES get cold here……even with no snow!
I think we only turned on the heater ONCE during this past winter. The temp had reached 28 degrees and we were worried about the pipes. So the heat was set to 40, I think, and then only at night. Once it stopped going below 35, we turned off the heater again, and it has stayed off. But then, I live in North Florida, which doesn’t get quite as cold as the frozen north, but not as warm as South Florida. We do get our freezing days.
Cold isn’t too much of a problem here, -20 is bearable if there is no wind. If we have a 60-90 mph wind out of the north even 40 degrees above zero can be a problem; log homes invariably leak a bit of air here and there. I try to keep moving around when it is cold to keep my blood circulating, good time to clean house!