You might reverse the question: to what extent do parents need extra space from their teenage children that the parents didn't need when the kids were younger?
Because when the teenage kids bring their friends over to the house, which they need to do and which as parents we welcomed, it really was nice to have some extra space as padding or a buffer.
For purposes of comparison, we have 5 kids (youngest now 26), 2560 sq feet, 5 bedroom, 2 baths. The swarm of kids and their friends running around was different when they were all 5 , 6, 8, 10 versus when they were 14, 16, 18. Now they're all in their 20s and 30s we all sit around the dining room table and eat and drink wine and prosecco and beer together and it's wonderful.
Me and one of my brothers shared a room all the way until I left for college, with no problems. But my younger two brothers weren't so happy sharing and got their own rooms by the time they were teenagers. I think it's hard to predict. I mean obviously you can just make them share, but that may or may make you miserable.
We needed lots of room, but that was before smart phones.
You might get lucky and your kids could be friendless loners in high school.
We have 1500 sq feet for the same number of kids. The oldest is almost a teenager. If I disappear some time in the next year then we should have gotten more space.
We do have two living areas and a back deck, which is nice.
Maybe you could stick some of the extra kids in a tent out back.
I think there's some real truth to 3. It's like packing for a trip and taking your phone, ipad, and laptop and knowing you have enough entertainment for a lifetime.
Now mine are teenagers and spend all their free time online, they hardly ever have friends round any more. They aren't being antisocial - they're interacting with their schoolmates as well as imaginary friends. As well as gaming, they'll do things like all watching the same movie at the same time, using Skype to chat about it. But it does mean there isn't the same need for buffer space as there was before the Internet.
I had my own room but my BFFs were brothers who shared. They did fine.
My instinctive answer is no, since as you note the vast majority of the world manages to live as teenagers with an even lower person per sq ft ratio. I don't have kids, so I can't give a more informed answer. As a teenager, I was kind of difficult and my mom was probably glad we had a lot of space between us, but that was before smart phones or surfing the Internet.
On America's endless need for "necessary" things, I did help look after a newborn with nothing but some cloth diapers and blankets, and he survived. Hand washing cloth diapers in a basin sucks, but doable and no one died of dysentery.
Also, people won't miss what they don't know. Your kids have always shared a room, so it's not like your suddenly forcing it on them as teenagers.
You people are so boringly centrist. Have a hunger games when the middle one turns 13.
Maybe pick your favorite and give that one their own room?
You're never going to sell TV rights like that, Spike.
Just don't do what my parents did, which was to make three kids share two bedrooms, and then decide that the middle child (me) would have to split her belongings, with a desk in one room and a bed in the other. Decades later I'm still filled with resentment.
When Solomonic parenting goes wrong.
If only you'd had your day in the arena, that bitterness would be instead a wellspring of victorious pride.
19 is amazing. It's like split custody between your siblings.
Also, people won't miss what they don't know
I disagree. As kids get older, they become more aware of what the norm is for their peers. They might be fine with what they have now, but eventually they'll start comparing what they have to what their friends have.
This is not to say that I think teenagers need separate rooms; I sure would have preferred my own room, but on the larger point of whether such an arrangement is necessary, I dunno.
It was the worst. At some point (when we were still really young) my sister decided that each room would be ruled by a "democratic vote." Since she had 2/3 ownership of one bedroom, she had two out of three votes in that room. She encouraged our brother to impose a similar rule in the other room. This resulted in my being locked out of both rooms simultaneously whenever my siblings wanted privacy. Democracy is terrible.
(Where were my parents when this was happening? It was like fucking Lord of the Flies in my house.)
That's why you need 3/4 of the states to amend the Constitution.
It does depend on personality to some extent - introverts may have a stronger need for their own space. One of the worst things about boarding school was the absolute lack of privacy of dormitory life. I used to take a book to a music practice room in the evenings after prep, just so I could have an hour or so alone.
26
WTF? I could *maybe* see something like that if there were hard space considerations (i.e. two beds and two desks wouldn't fit in either room), but as someone who shared rooms with siblings, your right to be in either space would have to have been imposed with an iron fist by your parents.
I still maintain sharing rooms can be fine for teens as long as it's not fucked up spectacularly like jms's parents did.
To be a little contrary, we expect 18-22 year olds to share rooms, we expect cohabitating adults to share rooms (beds, even), and less and less we have siblings share rooms but we think it's fairly normal for little kids to share rooms. I don't think there's anything weird about expecting same sex teen siblings to share rooms. (I can see how kids going through puberty might be uncomfortable sharing a room with an opposite sex sibling, especially if they're also going through puberty.)
My grandparents had de facto joint custody of my sibs and I, and even though they had a 4 bedroom house, my sister and I didn't even get a bedroom, we each had beds in nooks in the hall. My grandmother didn't think bedrooms were necessary or even all that healthy for young kids. I stayed my hall bed until I was 18, although when I was 16-18 I sometimes slept in the spare bedroom near my hall bed.
My grandmother grew up in a three room house with 12 people. The girls (4) slept on the floor of the three rooms along with their mother, and her brothers + father slept in the flour mill my great-grandfather ran. In retrospect, that was pretty dangerous, and my grandmother could have easily lost all the men in her family in a fire. My grandmother did marry at 18 just so she could get out of her house and not have to raise her siblings, so it's maybe not good evidence for having to share cramped spaces.
On the flip side though, my MIL slept in a bed with her mother in one bedroom, and her younger brother slept in a bed with her father in a separate bedroom.* Their oldest brother got his own room until he was sent off to boarding school in a foreign country at age 10. My husband's uncle clearly resents the fact he was made to sleep on his own and then sent off to boarding school as a child. So YMMV.
*The house had 7(?) bedrooms, so it wasn't due to lack of space.
This is a similar floor plan to our house, ours is a bit bigger
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/fullscreen/view-floorplan.html?propertyId=57042625
Downstairs the living and dining areas are two separate rooms, there's a large cloakroom before the kitchen, and the kitchen and utility rooms are one big room. The 'dining' room was a playroom when the kids were little, and is now (mostly) used as a bedroom - Kid B's atm, but she's obviously at university, so it's a handy spare room/spare desk/place to play Xbox. We've got our loft partially converted - we use it as a bedroom but it's not a proper room really. Kid A has it currently, when she's here. So we made five bedrooms out of a three bedroom house.
When the kids were young we had many different configurations of sharing, and gradually things evolved as their differences widened. Kid A has always been a rather noisy night owl so no one really wanted to share a room with her, lol. They definitely all need their space at times - if those spaces were smaller areas within one big room it might well be ok. Hard to predict.
Just rereading your post - I don't think you need *more* space for teenagers - their toys tend to take up less room, for a start. Just different space.
Just rereading your post - I don't think you need *more* space for teenagers - their toys tend to take up less room, for a start. Just different space.
31: You had nooks? Luxury! My brother and I split a dog crate behind the refrigerator. It stunk and the dog took a finger every night, but it was ours, and we felt lucky to have it.
6- They used to, two to a room, but we renovated a couple years ago and split their two rooms into four small rooms, Like really small, officially about 85 sq feet for two and 100 for the other two, although they're not actually that small because they have uncounted floor space under the eaves which for kids is fine because they're short and also they have vaulted ceilings. Picture the top of a gabled house, and the shared room was a square centered under the peak, then we opened up the whole thing out to the sides and up to the peak and put a wall down the middle so each square room became two big triangles.
You can maximize space usage by manipulating time, i.e. having kids sleep in shifts.
37
This is a tried and true technique used by impoverished migrant workers the world over! Your kids will love it!
Though, I agree that teens do in general need some space to call their own, but it doesn't have to be a whole bedroom. Some little space, like an alcove or even a closet can work. Also, given you live in Texas and have the great outdoors, it could even be an outdoor fort or treehouse-type structure.
Loft beds with desks under can give kids space that feels a little bit private, especially if they put curtains around the sides.
Also, the top bed of a bunk bed feels kind of private, to me.
Please. LB and I shared a bedroom until I left for college in a 2 bed/1 bath apartment that was somewhere around 800 square feet. 4 large people plus a cat with an outsize personality and a love of stealth attacks if you went to the bathroom in the middle of the night. We fought some, as would be expected, but it was completely manageable. It did keep us out of the apartment a lot as teenagers because there wasn't any privacy, but you accommodate. I have to say, whatever bad feeling or resentment I have about my childhood (and trust me, those feelings are there), none of them center around the size of the apartment.
100 sq ft isn't that small? Our three smaller bedrooms are all about that size: one's about 10x10 with an odd extra bit for the door, the other two are about 9x12 - one of those has a 5' double bed in atm, plus several bookcases and one desk and no storage which is a bit of an issue (!), and we used to have two single beds in the other. Maybe we're just used to smaller rooms.
Also, the top bed of a bunk bed feels kind of private, to me.
As long as you don't wobble the bed too much having a wank, you're fine.
43
Make sure to invest in un-wobbly bed posts.
Friends of ours have four kids in a small two bedroom house. There's six years between #1 and #2, and then the younger three are quite close together. Last year they built a wooden bedroom in the tiny garden for the eldest. #3 has the larger bedroom, #2 and #4 are boys and have bunk beds in the other room. The parents have a sofa bed downstairs. This year's project is a loft conversion for #2. There are usually ways to get what's needed if you're not stuck on what you *should* have.
Friends of ours have four kids in a small two bedroom house. There's six years between #1 and #2, and then the younger three are quite close together. Last year they built a wooden bedroom in the tiny garden for the eldest. #3 has the larger bedroom, #2 and #4 are boys and have bunk beds in the other room. The parents have a sofa bed downstairs. This year's project is a loft conversion for #2. There are usually ways to get what's needed if you're not stuck on what you *should* have.
Oh ffs, I definitely only pressed it once then.
44 - sturdy bunk beds are a must! Remember that heebie!
43
But also it teaches the valuable skill of stealth masturbation, which is easily transferable to the skill of quiet sex when they're a bit older.
Think of how popular they'll be with their college roommates if they've already figured out how to have sex under the covers without anyone else knowing.
42: Yeah, 100 sq ft would definitely be described as a "double bedroom" here. Tatsu's present room is about 6x9, with just room for a loft bed, a chest of drawers, and a small bookcase. In our last house both boys' rooms were about 8x7.
Yeah that's not right, our master is only about 120. Maybe they're 60 and 80? I'll have to go measure again.
Since she had 2/3 ownership of one bedroom, she had two out of three votes in that room.
I'm honestly pleased and impressed by her ability with fractions. This is basically the Monte Carlo problem.
Hah. I was coming in to explain my childhood, but it's all done.
My kids have separate bedrooms, but for weird apartment layout reasons, very little privacy, and they seem fine with it.
We have 1500 sq feet for the same number of kids.
I know you keep adding more but you have 1500 kids now?
Jammies' recollection is that the kids' shared bedroom is 14x7. They've got two very wobbly IKEA bunkbeds in there, where the bottom bunk is a mattress on the floor. Of course, nobody's yanking it very violently yet. So later on, two could share the guest room and the big room could be converted into two 7x7 rooms. Not a big room, even by European standards.
I feel like I should have said that, but I failed.
It's one thing to have 1500 kids, but it's weird that they all have one square foot. I guess their other foot is a wooden leg named John.
We are the entire population of a village in Europe.
People love to tell us that we'll need more space when the kids are teenagers.
Who are these people?! Real estate agents? Or just people?
||
Speaking of living space my AC is out again in my apartment. It's 76 degrees in here and it's only 6:30 AM. And it's supposed to get up to 100 out today. I just got my AC serviced last month. Argh.
(At least it encouraged me to clean up my apartment which I needed to do anyway for the remote part of my interview).
|>
I only sympathize in SI units.
Those are SI units. He's not exaggerating when he says it's going to be boiling.
I see. NMM to Barry, I guess.
Still here and on my way to work. Hoping it will get fixed by the time I get back home.
FWIW, I shared a bedroom with my brother growing up. Not sure how my frequent masturbation in our wobbly bunk bed scarred him. He never said anything. Thankfully for me he did not hit puberty until after I left for college. I also started sleeping on the couch in the basement junior year, but that was to aid in sneaking out to go to college keggers, not to get more privacy.
My ex and I each have two bedroom places and our two girls (12 and 9) are fine sharing.
67 So there's still plenty of time to yank it violently if you're so inclined.
I shared a bedroom with various and sundry sisters growing up. We took turns having "my own room," with the much-coveted extra bedroom in constant rotation amongst the four daughters. Though, as the eldest daughter, I have to admit that I got more than my fair share of a room of my own.
It wasn't the bedrooms that really mattered, though: it was the shared bathroom (one bathroom for six people: totally normal until about the 1970s or 1980s or so? but me and my sisters, we felt we were living in a state of absolute deprivation...).
My dad thought an electric hairdryer was a frivolity, and an unaccustomed luxury. And so, when our electric hairdryer broke down, our dad hit upon the genius idea of reversing the air flow on the vacuum cleaner in order to dry our hair; and sure, wouldn't our hair dry just the same? Can still remember going to school with my hair all dried-out and musty, having been dried out by a damn vacuum cleaner. O, the shame...
On the one hand, it's hard not to be disgusted with the ever-growing American house. (Did I ever share that slide that claimed that each member of the average household now has as much space as the entire household had mid-last-century?) On the other hand, privacy and solitude are genuine human needs (quiet is an underrated part of those), and having to leave your home to find them seems wrong. If you're space-constrained, maybe designate an "away room" that people can share/sign up for.
Some call it the doghouse; others, as the Egyptians do, the temple.
70.last is indeed amazing.
I just realized that I have my own incredible traumatizing tale to tell but it will have to wait till I'm back at home on my computer.
What else is the internet for but the triggering of repressed memories?
Since I was an only child who grew up rattling around houses and rooms that were obviously bigger than one me and 1 or 2 working parents needed (for uninteresting idiosyncratic reasons, my parents preferred to put me in the master bedroom of most of the houses we lived in), I have no good on-topic stories to share. Not that that will stop me from trying.
From that background, I guess it's no surprise that I have found the size of rooms/houses in the UK difficult to adjust to even though in principle I like more compact living. It's not that I have a lot of stuff or want more space for anything in particular, I just often find myself feeling cooped-in to the point of distraction since moving here, and have tended to sacrifice other desirable features in a flat just so I can have a bedroom that doesn't provoke this feeling. Maybe it's a mistake to write it off to my spatially extravagant suburban upbringing -- I can certainly see why there's such a strong/better culture of public social spaces in European cities. In the US, I always liked having friends over to socialise. Here, I can't wait to get out of my goddamn tiny flat and get to the pub to see them.
I'm interested in Buttercup's point in 30, that most people share most of their lives sharing bedrooms, so why do we have the sense that teenage siblings shouldn't.
I agree that the feeling that teenagers *should* have their own rooms is probably too strong, but maybe "nice if possible" would cover it, kind of for the same reason that a lot of people feel like it's healthy to be single for a while in your younger years instead of constantly in one relationship or another -- a bit of being just with yourself at a point in time when you're finding yourself. As a definite introvert, I would have found sharing a room with a boisterous brother stressful and suffocating and I'm glad I had both the room and the time on my own as a latch-key kid to be with just myself during those formative years. I would want that for any kid of mine, but I wouldn't worry too much about it if it weren't in the cards financially.
timely for me as girl y just turned 13 yesterday! she has a new loft bed above girl y's and she lives up there now. we are moving in september and thinking of an hdb flat that would have enough (small) bedrooms that they could each have their own. we actually could do it now but have a middle room with a sofabed where guests can stay and thus the girls can split up to do homework/hang out separately. I think it would be nice for them to have separate rooms but it's not by any means necessary.
two 7x7 rooms. Not a big room, even by European standards.
Feet or metres? Because 7x7 feet is a walk-in cupboard by European standards.
7x7 feet is a walk-in cupboard by European standards.
In this city it's a teen's bedroom, if you want a three-bedroom house for anything under an astronomical rent. When househunting, I was shown places with "bedrooms" into which you might just about have squeezed a baby's cot.
Then I guess you just have to hope your teens stop growing under 6'.
When I was a teenager, my favorite thing was to be by myself in the house. In hindsight I think I was free from the judgments that I assumed everyone was constantly making in their heads.
||
Imagine an election campaign in which one party* promises to cap energy prices to "to prevent gas and electricity providers from ripping off their customers", while the other** offers to create public holidays to commemorate the country's patron saints.
Who are people going to vote for?
* Tories
** Labour
|>
I don't know how many square feet my house is, but the main rooms weee built in 1883 and the kitchen and my bedroom are a much later addition on the back, so families like ours and bigger have managed there for ages. The three girls share the front room that is not only big but tall, so Nia is in a loft bed and the other two, uncomfortable with that sort of height, each have one of the little IKEA mini-loft beds (Kura) I believe heebie's children use too. Nia has a dresser and small couch and giant mess under hers. Mara has the baby doll nursery she and Nia play with incessantly under hers. Selah has her own doll and toy zone, though in front of her bed is the one of those rugs with roads and so on where she can drive her toy cars. Nia would very much like her own room but for several reasons can't handle it.
I can't believe I've written this much but I'm in a hotel room waiting for them to wake and I guess bored. Point is they also have a large playroom that can become a bedroom someday and also a smaller room that right now I share as my office with their desks they basically never use. I'm tempted to put the desks in the basement until they're ready to use them under loft beds and turn the rest of it into a craft room for myself or something that will offend them but make me happy.
Is 84 for real? And are the footnotes correctly assigned?
Brexit seems unpopular. Has Labour considered campaigning against that?
re: 88
You'd think.
It's a fucking disaster.
I'm getting bastard tired of being lectured by people on Twitter about how I'm supposed to somehow like Corbyn and his fucking idiocy. With explicit or implicit implications that anyone who doesn't wholeheartedly buy into him is either a crypto-Tory or (worse for them) a crypto-Blairite.
When what I'd actually like is someone of the left who wasn't a moron, and an enabler of the Tories and their supporters' worst instincts.
88 That has had me wondering the exact same thing for many months now.
So my childhood/teenage trauma, let me show you it.
When I was a young teen, maybe 13 or so, I can't recall exactly how old I was my parents took the door to my room off the hinges. And it stayed like that for months. For behavior that in retrospect was a combination of normal teenage rebellious behavior and very probably depression. Oh yeah, I was in counseling at my mother's insistence but at no point was it suggested that that was a fucked up thing to do. This lasted until I put it back up myself. A few months later it came down again after I barricaded myself in the room after a family fight (by sliding the dresser in front of the door). This lasted awhile and IIRC I moved my ass downstairs into the dark yet finished (yes, wood-paneled) basement. And sunk into a very serious depression.
I wonder that I'm even on speaking terms anymore their Fox-news watching Trump voting behavior aside.
re: 91
Labour, like the Tories, are basically divided on the issue of Europe.
However, with Labour, the anti-European mob are a relatively small sect within the party, I think, they just happen to be the sect in control.
Not only that, Corbyn and his fucking mates, while professing to want a humane and fair exit from the European Union continue to fail to make even the slightest bit of effective use of their MPs to frustrate the worst bits of Tory 'hard' Brexit policy. Continually backing the Tories in Brexit-related votes, for example, and three-line-whipping their MPs.
I'm almost speechless with rage whenever I think of that bearded prick.*
* and I (stupidly)** voted for him in the first leadership election.
** although the other candidates were largely also a shower of bastards.
75 And yeah, I haven't thought of that in many years now.
I always vaguely resented my brother's space in the house we lived in when I was in middle/high school. The upper level of the house was split in half and then one half split again. The two quarters were his room and the only bathroom; the other half was my space - but not really a room, because you had to go through it to get to his room or the bathroom. So I had a desk and dresser on one side, a bed on the other side (eventually with low bookcases making it a bit of a nook), and a heavily-used passageway in between, as well as being open to the stairs down.
(Ducking out of dealing with the problem going forward by only having one kid, though).
88: Brexit, though, cuts across the Labour (and for that matter the Tory) support base. Most Labour MPs are against it, but probably not a huge majority of Labour voters.
I had a good sized room in a suburban late 70s designed contemporary home- the geometry was all weird triangles and such- but my brother had a room of similar size plus a loft. At one point in high school a girl lived up there for a while, and I never found out the whole story about what happened. I think it had something to do with she got kicked out of her house or was in trouble or something but my parents and brother (5.5 yrs older, so I guess I was ~11 at the time) never told me exactly what was going on. I guess I could ask now but it seems weird to bring it up out of nowhere- So, what was the deal with that girl you kept in your loft?
No, wait, SP's brother was definitely Greg Brady.
92 has me making horrified faces. I can't really imagine doing that to a kid that age without serious extenuating circumstances. It IS amazing you speak to them.
99: My dirtbag high school boyfriend spent about four months living in our basement. I wonder whether my sister (only four years younger) has the same hazy memories? He had graduated a year before me and ws filing remedial community college courses. He had (no kidding!) a paper route, which paid sort of well if you had no expenses, and then his (troubled) mother kicked him out. My parents let him stay for quite a while. Most awkward moment was probably when my father sat him down with want ads in the paper and suggested he get a job or maybe speak to military recruiters about his future. (The story ends sort of happily. I went away to college and dumped him; he ended up married to a Special Ed teacher.)
ws filing = was failing. I'd like to buy an A, please.
SP's brother was Mr. Rochester.
So if Heebie runs out of space she can just send the extras to SP's sugar estate.
Right, SP? You seem like a nice guy.
Feet or metres? Because 7x7 feet is a walk-in cupboard by European standards.
Feet. In the 14x7 form, we do have the Kura beds that Thorn mentions, which are [googling] 6.5'x3.5', and there is no room for playing.
I think it must be more like 14x10. There's a trunk at the foot of one of the beds and still space to walk around it. So the divided rooms would be 10x7, minus the footprint of the wall that divides them.
OTOH I current live in my father in laws house but I guess that's different when you're an adult vs in high school.
101 Again, I hadn't thought of that in years and I was shaking so much just writing it out it's written even worse than my usual ramblings here. Think it all went on between 13 and maybe 15 or 16.
92 is awful, and something that I've heard of before in families with very fucked-up dynamics.
We will start emptying out our house while hers are still teens so no problem.
My wife's sister's apartment has no doors on any of the rooms. That always struck me as really quite odd. I think the bathroom now has a door, but for a while it didn't.
One extra reason that we're having this conversation is that we're currently bidding on raising our house a couple feet. The other thing that the busybodies say is, "Paying to elevate your house?? Are you nuts?? Why don't you just move?"
Or by sugar estate do you mean my parents home with the loft of random teen girls- that house is messed up. My dad is a hoarder and the house needs serious repairs (same age as me and never redone the roof)
Isn't it already on stilts because of the nearby river? Is the raising a flood thing or an add more space thing?
I mean the plantation in the Caribbean on which the family fortune was built. The teenage girls will be supplied by Heebie.
114: It's currently about 4' off the ground, and the flood in 2015 was just about 4' of water. We're assuming that the floods will get worse. It looks like the next level of structure would get us about 3 feet higher.
We'll get estimates next week, but my guess is $50K. I think that's cheaper than moving, because I don't think we'd end up in a house within 40K of our house, plus closing costs. I assume we'd be tempted to upgrade.
More importantly, we love our location and it'd be tough to find a house in a neighborhood that was as central and walkable as this one.
111: When we moved into a rental house in grad schoo (a 3/2)l, there were two doors: the guest bathroom and guest bedroom (where the owner's wife, a friend but not a really close friend, was staying with us for a month before joining him). The rest had been removed to be painted and somehow the owner we rented from had never gotten around to it. Literally the day after we moved in, we hung doors. Because it's nice to have sex when your roomate is home without her being able to watch from the living room. NTTAWWT if everyone's cool.
I think the bedroom square footage isn't a very big deal; it's more whether there's a teenager-friendly hangout combined with whether you want a pack of teenagers at your house often. Like the canonical basement with a few beat-up couches and a TV. Or maybe you don't want all their friends over, so it's good not to have a bunch of extra sprawling space. It also sort of depends whether you want them to play or do homework in their bedrooms. Small would discourage that, but if you want them to mostly be in the larger shared spaces, it's good design.
||
Could one of you clever people or your iPhones please tell me what the song playing here is?
|>
93: yeah, but at least Corbyn doesn't look funny when he eats a sandwich, which is the important thing.
(sigh)
120: That there is Midnight City by M83, or so my phone sez.
UK re Brexit seems to be where US (or I guess U.K. too) was regarding war circa 2002-3. A few members of one major party were opposed, but leadership of both parties are in favor, one just claims they want to do it the "right" way. And 15 years later the country will still be dealing with problems caused by it.
117 More importantly, we love our location and it'd be tough to find a house in a neighborhood that was as central and walkable as this one.
Or swimmable?
As long as my Fitbit counts it, whatev.
92 sounds truly awful, a real violation of the expectation of trust.
"Paying to elevate your house?? Are you nuts?? Why don't you just move?"
Because moving (i.e., selling one house and then buying another) might be more expensive than renovating/improving your existing house, and would certainly involve a lot of transaction costs that you would never recover? And also because your current house, whatever its issues or problems, is at least a known quantity; whereas a new house might have costly issues or problems of its own, which you would only discover a year or two after purchase?
||
Those of you who are friends with me at The Other Place will have seen this already, but for the others: Sharky came back to Anchorage from Juneau for a surprise visit this weekend! She arranged for a mutual friend of ours to invite me for drinks after work on Friday, but when I showed up the bartender handed me an envelope, and when I opened it the note inside said that our friend was unable to make it but that Sharky was, and told me to turn around. I did, and there she was!
So, anyway, that's why I haven't been around this weekend.
|>
Sharky? Have I missed this here or is it something only known to those at the other place?
127 a real violation of the expectation of trust.
And many more besides just as egregious years after. I did cut them off for years but when I let my guard down and was vulnerable after my second divorce they did me just as bad.
I should probably tell the story behind the name at some point, but not yet.
133,134 I was fixated on another pseud at the time.
I think the real trick is making sure that each sibling gets equal space considerations and equal "ownership" considerations - you see that throughout this thread, because when it goes awry, it can really go awry.
Also, understanding that teenagers need privacy - not just from parents, but from siblings - even when they're sharing space.
I'm the oldest of two, but when we moved into the "last" house my family lived in before I went to college, there were only two finished bedrooms. The plan was to finish off the basement for me, but it wasn't done yet. So the second bedroom was my little brother's room, but I had to sleep on the extra bed in there for six months. So we weren't "sharing" a room so much as I was sleeping in "his" room. It was a nightmare.
But then my room was finished, and I had the whole basement to myself. Fantastic, right? in a lot of ways yes - it was a huge space with both a sleeping and sitting area (I still miss my blue velour couches). But the basement also contained the storage room and the laundry room, and the way things were laid out, you had to basically go THROUGH my room to get to those - I literally had no door, since it was just a flight of stairs. Does anyone want to guess what it was like as a 17-year old girl with an 12 year old brother who could come running down the stairs at any time of day/night with the "I just need something from the laundry!" excuse?
I'm now 43-years old and still live by myself. I sometimes joke that if I ever got married, my husband would have to buy the apartment across the hall, because I can never share my space with anyone ever again.
I did truly love living by myself.
I realized that since last August I'm living by myself for the first time ever. Every other time as an adult I've always had roommates in one form or another, or lived as a guest in someone else's home/yoga studio.
Thinking about it and reading comments, I think maybe it's ownership more than actual space that's important. (I mean, some space is necessary to be owned, but it doesn't have to be much). Living or spending time in others' houses was awful for me, even though I had my own room and bathroom, because it always involved living and doing things on other people's schedules and to other people's idiosyncratic preferences, and even in my own space I couldn't do whatever I pleased, since it wasn't "really" my space.
What if you built a blanket fort?
We're trying to figure out whether we want to upgrade to a bigger house. I'm leaning "no", because it seems like it would suck to be house poor, but a second full bath and newer amenities would be nice. (House is 1100 sq ft listed, but with a finished basement which nearly doubles the usable space.
141
Could you add a full bathroom to your basement?
You should see what people say when you tell them that you live in a 600 sq ft one-bedroom apartment with a baby, and have no plans to move.
My family of four lives in a 750 square feet apartment, you spoiled motherfuckers.
OT: Here's a Juicero followup:
https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so-expensive-6add74594e50
Our place is 800 sq ft, I think, and absolutely fine. Two bedrooms. Although the bedrooms aren't huge because we have a pointlessly large entrance/hall which is good for nothing (as it has no walls where you could put books) except hanging laundry, and a shoe rack.
142: That's basically the debate -- second bathroom (which would move one bedroom to the basement), new kitchen, floors, etc. Basically make either a perfect little gem of a house, or move somewhere new.
148
It makes it clear it's not simply a straight up grift, but sort of the essence of deluded silicon valley thinking.
Thinking about space and entitlement, in 1946 my grandparents bought some land and started to build their house. They couldn't borrow money and didn't really have any of their own, so they built their house as they saved up money for materials. The first thing they built was a two-car garage, and they lived in it with their (then) two children. Then their friends' house was washed away in a flood, so they invited them and their 4 kids to move into the garage. Then my father was born in the fall. They didn't have space for a crib, so the put him in a drawer (no one commented on whether they shut the drawer if he got too fussy). That means they had a total of 11 people, 4 adults and 8 children, living in a two-car garage (I'd estimate it was about 500 sq ft, give or take). Nowadays when you read articles about migrant farm workers crammed into garages in CA, it feels so remote and awful, but I'm only a generation removed from that sort of lifestyle arrangement.
Before the garage, my grandparents lived for a few years in government housing, which my grandmother said was terrible, and before that, they lived in a trailer they build themselves out of scraps of wood. The wheels were wooden too, because there wasn't any rubber available.
Maybe they designed the machine before they designed the bag and then felt the squeeze of sunk costs.
145 is amazing.
It's like Elon Musk got really fucking high and decided he was going to disrupt juice.
Autopilot spaceships supplied with self-juicing packs: Mars One sustenance problems solved.
"Nowadays when you read articles about migrant farm workers crammed into garages in CA, it feels so remote and awful, but I'm only a generation removed from that sort of lifestyle arrangement".
People always underestimate how grim things were in the 50s. In 1951 half of all residences in Glasgow didn't have running water or didn't have electricity or didn't have either.
I am extremely puzzled about why they decided to build the garage before building a house, though. I suppose garages are smaller. Still.
6-8 guys in a garage, water provided via the garden hose and electricity via an extension cord from the house, with strictly limited bathroom access in the house is super common in LA and the tenants are "migrants" only in the sense they are from Mexico or Central America, but are not "migrants" in the sense of following the crops. More likely construction and back of house hospitality (dishwashing, janitorial, etc.). The worst I've seen is ~6 guys in a dirt floor crawl space under the house (both house and garage were also chockablock), not enough head room to stand up. And they were fighting eviction bc the City was cracking down on the landlord.
I'd guess at least 3-4 mock trial students are living in converted garages each year, along with parents, siblings and usually a grandparent or two. Usually in SF the garage is not detached so it is plumbed and has electricity, even if not a legal second unit.
This is a thing in London, too - the search string is "beds in sheds".
as for the garage first thing, I've seen this - the idea is you throw something up quick so you can move out of the tent/trailer/whatever while you build the house.
153: I should add to that point that my father was actually born in such a place - not in Glasgow, but with no running water, and with heating inadequate enough that my grandmother remembered having to break the ice in the bedroom washbasin in the morning. This is cheating slightly, though, because that wasn't actually my grandparents' permanent residence, just the castle in which my grandfather was stationed at the time. Their permanent residence was a comfortable flat.
Also 145 really is amazing. And heartening, in a way. I mean, better to be charging $400 for $350 worth of beautifully complex engineering that no one wants, than to be charging $400 for a piece of cheap tat that doesn't work. If they'd only built one they could have sold it as art, along the lines of Norbert Wiener's Useless Machine.
It's wonderful. Those gorgeously machined, over-strong alloy castings like something out of something worthwhile! That 168MHz ARM 7 board! I've owned computers with less processing power!
Also, what a crazy-ass solution. Wouldn't it be easier to squeeze it between a roller and a fixed plate?
I think that's the charming thing about it. It works, and it performs the desired function, but it is vastly more complicated and expensive and over-engineered than it needs to be. It's like someone gave W. Heath Robinson access to a CNC machine.
There is definitely room for an updated set of Silicon Valley-set Professor Branestawm stories in which his bizarre inventions are without exception funded to prototype stage by Dedshott Capital Management, LLC.
Here, for example, is the Professor, disrupting the pancake.
http://friendlyblackandwhitedog.blogspot.co.uk/2010/07/professor-branestawms-inventions.html
re: 156
Water left in a dish overnight would freeze in our council house when I was growing up. Ice frozen to the inside of the window was not unusual. We used to run downstairs to stand in front of a small electric fire and get dressed, and I remember wearing my sister's tights under my trousers as improvised long-johns.
Coal-fired central heating, which worked quite well, but which was almost impossible to keep going overnight. That combined with a steel prefab house with no insulation, and huge windows meant that temperature could drop right down overnight.
The council refurbished it when I was about 10, by dropping a brick shell around the old metal house and filling the gap with insulation. They then shrunk the windows right down. The house became hugely more thermally efficient.
Why couldn't you keep a fire going overnight? I'm pretty sure the self-feeding stove (or whatever they call it) was a thing back then.
Anyway, I was raised in a very nice, if overly 1970s, house. It was 2,500 square feed and four bedrooms (one used as a den) on half an acre. It was bigger than any of the houses of the people I knew. Pictures of the interior are on-line now. Somebody replaced all the shag carpeting with hardwood floors, took out walls, enclosed the patio, and otherwise made it unrecognizable.
I guess the shag carpeting really was replaced in all but one room before we moved out.
We had a dog named Polly. She would sit in the backyard and kill birds or small mammals. She would also steal food from children who were too slow.
The dog was manifestly unable to fly, but the birds would still get killed. In conclusion, birds are stupid.
re: 163
We had the stove provided by the council. It could be banked up overnight, but having it last fully through from night to morning fairly often didn't happen.
This is the one we had:
https://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/NjAwWDgwMA==/z/Fp4AAOSwk1JWcQff/$_86.JPG
although it was embedded in a wall, obviously, so you only saw the front.
I suppose if it is in the wall, you can't really have a giant hopper of coal right next to it.
re: 169
Yeah, and it was quite small. You wouldn't get a huge amount of coal in. When it was running it produced a fair bit of heat, and heated the hot water for baths, etc. It just wasn't instant on, or constantly on, in the way that modern heating is.
The next house we lived in was in some ways even worse. It had a small open coal fire (so much less safe to leave on the go overnight), and only had radiators downstairs. No plumbing in the upper half of the house. Which was tricky as my brother was a newborn at the time. The council replaced the central heating with gas a couple of years in, and completely redid the insulation, though, so it wasn't decades of grinding cold.
re: 169
Yeah, it was in the living room, too. So not as if it was in some basement somewhere.
My dad's house on the farm was heated with burning corn cobs or coal, depending. Coal cost money, but obviously held a great deal more heat per unit of volume you put in the hopper.
Though not a council house, my grandparents' house was similar to what ttaM describes in 170.2. It had no central heating, just open coal fires. When we visited, my grandmother would put bricks on the hearth to warm in the evening, then wrap them in towels and put them into our beds instead of hot water bottles. She had a gas oven in the kitchen, but baked bread in an oven built into the side of one of the fireplaces.
That was still better than their previous cottage, where my mother was born (in 1940); it had no electricity or gas, and the loo was an outhouse at the bottom of the garden. My mother relates how excited she was at age 9 to move to a place where you could turn the lights on and off just by flipping a switch.
I hope she appreciates "The Clapper."
Anyway, dad talked about doing his homework by the light of a kerosene lantern and having to use an outhouse. My grandfather was probably better funded than the council, but really didn't see the point of spending money on luxuries.
Last year there was a family of 10 living next door to us, in a house that is maybe 1300 square feet. And for a time, they took in a mother and her four children.
If you live/d in an old house, look at what the 1940 census enumerator's record says from when they went door-to-door. Before an extension and back house were built in the 80's, my childhood home was 2BD/1BA. Recorded in 1940 I found 9 people listed as living there: two nuclear families, 2 kids each, in-laws of each other (older sister's and younger brother's families), plus the mother they had in common. Only 2 (the older pair of parents) listed as employed. It could be that there was an outbuilding since torn down; no covered garage in my time at least.
My Dad and I lived in my grandmother's garage for about a year. He fixed it up nicely so it was like a regular room. It took about four months of living in partially constructed room before it was fixed up, but it was quite tolerable.
When Pittsburgh's population peaked, there were houses built in the backyards of other houses. These were mostly built poorly and since been torn down.
We just discovered someone living in the coal cellar of our house. He'd left bloodstained handprints on the door and extensive supplies of human waste inside, and was lighting his little pied-a-terre with candles placed considerately underneath the gas main. We evicted him (the police had promised to turn up to help but in the end forgot or something, so we relied instead on a large neighbour).
I hope that was supposed to be Opinionated Character in a Victorian Novel.
To be clear, I should have said former coal cellar. No coal in there any more (as hinted at by the existence of the gas main).
The lesson is that when you see something that looks vaguely like a bloodstained handprint on your cellar door, you should do more than simply think "huh, that's funny, if this was a horror film I'd think that was a bloodstained handprint" and actually investigate, because it might actually be a bloodstained handprint left by some dope who is unintentionally trying to blow you up.
I was a little weirded out when a drunk college kid passed out on our back deck, and I found him in the morning snuggled up in the kids' beach towel. But yours is way more unsettling.
I would have assumed it was your SAS service coming back to haunt you.
He'd presumably been down there a while. We don't really use the cellar for much except low-demand storage (painting kit, garden tools), so the only reason any of us would go down there would be to read the gas and electric meters, and obviously that only happens every few months.
Dash it, Ajay, you make me happy that I have no cellar.
Dash it, Ajay, you make me happy that I have no cellar.
THAT YOU KNOW OF.
Another good lesson is to leave no obvious trace when you are living unwanted in someone else's house.
193: yes indeed. He had been very careful to sneak in and out of the cellar when no one was around, so if he'd been a bit tidier he would be living there still. There's a lesson there for all of us.
It's perfectly possible to live in a roofspace for weeks at a time without the person living in the rest of the house knowing you're there. (Source: not personal experience.)
I can go into details but they are mostly summed up by the word "clingfilm".
I'm pretty sure the roofspace of my house is unlivable hot and humid for much of the year.
You should probably check up there, even so.
How the heck did this guy sneak in (even if no one was around), and are you worried about him returning?
Coal cellars usually have doors to the exterior.
My roofspace does not. Assuming I know what "roofspace" is.
The cellar isn't beneath the house - it's not a basement. It's a coal-cellar, underneath the front yard and accessible through a separate staircase leading down. Since there wasn't much worth stealing in there, we hadn't locked it. This may have been a mistake in retrospect. Not worried about him returning; we now have a more robust door on the cellar, and he has been seriously discouraged from returning.
You should have painted over the bloody hand print with a circle/slash thing.
That might have been seen as a sectarian message. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Hand_of_Ulster
So creepy! It makes me want to inspect my coal room, but that one is only accessible from inside the house. And now that I think of it, my dog would have put up some kind of stink. Its all very curious to consider how this conversation would have gone. Glad he's out.
204: That's just the O'Neills. Nothing sectarian about that.
205: Why would somebody build a house where you had to load coal by walking through the house? There's a door to the outside, probably hidden by the guy who has been living there since before you moved in.
There's a former small coal door where the coal was loaded in via the door/chute from the driveway, but there was never an entrance from outside.
Which explains why you hardly notice the missing food.
A great horned owl scarecrow might be what you need to keep away all the bloody-handed hobbits, brownies, and Nac Mac Feegle you have running around.
Dumb fucking hobbits will just think it's the eagles coming. Again.
So, how come no one has asked yet why the hand print was bloody?!?
Was it his own blood?
213: I guess? The police seemed remarkably unconcerned about it.
They've all seen The Wicker Man and know what's good for them.
Because I know everyone was waiting to hear the outcome of 52, the large and small rooms are approximately 77 and 91 square feet, respectively. Plus they have low ceiling space, 2 to 5 feet high, of 21 and 39 square feet which is enough space to put a mattress on the floor.
179: Just one couple lived in ours. Gay at least, but only because that was their last name.
Update: police have now worked out that the guy in question was a fugitive, and are showing some belated signs of interest in the whole business.
The bloody handprint possibly being suggestive there?
Tailor Industries http://www.Tailorind.com Manufacturer of Mens Motorcycle Leather Jackets Womens Motorcycle Leather Jackets Men's Leather Motorcycle Vests Women's Leather Motorcycle Vests Motorcycle Leather Pants/Chaps Motorcycle Leather Racing Suits Motorcycle Bags Motorcycle Gloves Motorcycle Boots Motorcycle Textile Mens Textile Jackets Ladies Textile Jackets Textile Pants Off Road Gloves Winter Gloves Rain Suits Mens Motorcycle Jackets Ladies Motorcycle Jackets Motorcycle Vests Motorcycle Pants Motorcycle Gloves Motorcycle Rain Suits MotorBike Ware Fashion Garments Men Leather Jackets Men Leather Coats Men Leather Vest Men Leather Pants Women Leather Jackets Women Leather Coats Women Leather Vest Women Leather Pants Leather Vests Leather Jackets Trachten Garments Men Bavarian Garments Women Bavarian Garments Children Bavarian Garments Men Bavarian Garments Lederhosen Kniebundhosen Trachten Shirts Trachten Jackets Trachten Vests Trachten Socks Trachten Shoes Women Bavarian Garments Short Lederhosen Kniebund lederhosen Mini Dirndl Midi Dirndl Long Dirndl Dirndl Aprons Trachten Shirts Trachten Blouses Dirndl Blouses Trachten Bag Trachten Shoes Children Bavarian Garments Kinder Lederhosen Kinder Dirndl Trachten Shirts Trachten Socks Trachten Shoes Western Wears Garments Cowboy Jackets Cowboy Vests Cowgirl Jackets Cowgirl Vests Cowgirl Poncho Cowgirl Skirts Cowgirl Coats Cowgirl Bags Cowgirl Belts Western Hats . All Products are Made of Premier Quality Materials By Tailor Industries Sialkot Pakistan.
Tailor Industries
Haji Pura Bun Road,
Sialkot-51310 Pakistan.
http://www.Tailorind.com
WhatsApp: +92-311-7857727
Email: industriestailor@gmail.com
https://www.twitter.com/_TailorIND
https://www.facebook.com/TailorIndustries
https://www.pinterest.com/TailorIndustries
https://www.plus.google.com/+TailorIndustries
https://www.linkedin.com/company/Tailor_Industries
