Buying Too Much House

The title says it all. I keep seeing blog posts and articles about micro homes, and I thought I'd analyze our living situation. Sharon recently talked about it in her post, so did Learnvest, and Krystal is currently living in a 215 square foot place while she is in Europe.

Micro homes and smaller living areas are an interesting concept. Many people do it for lots of different reasons. The reasons could be to save money for your future house, be more eco-friendly, not needing a large space, and being more efficient with what you have already.

While I don't think I could live in a house that's 168 square feet (especially with 3 other people like they do in the one story), I do know that our current house is too big for us since we only have the two of us and 2 dogs.

Our house has 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and a finished basement. Not everything is used of course since there's just the two of us. And oh yeah we have a ton of closet space all over the house that sits there empty.I don't think I could live in a micro home mainly because I like having all of my stuff (call me a hoarder if you want. the boyfriend already calls me that ha), and I'm sure my dogs would not be happy with a small space. And I can't give up my dogs. It would be really hard to have such a small space. I also like my privacy, and I don't think there would be a lot of that in a small space.

What do we need these three extra bedrooms for? Nothing.

Bedroom #1 – This would be our bedroom. We sleep in it of course.
Bedroom #2 – We put a guest bed in there because it looked sad being empty. We were given the furniture in this room from the boyfriend's family and I received blankets and pillows as a housewarming gift, so this room is full of free stuff.
Bedroom #3 – This is used for storage for now, but will be my closet soon. It used to be the man cave, but we just moved the man cave downstairs. Storage could be put in one of the numerous closets though and it would all fit fine.
Bedroom #4 – Completely empty and most likely always will be.

Do we need a guest bedroom? No. How about a closet that's the size of a bedroom? No. And of course we don't need a bedroom that will always be empty.

I would like to say that we will “grow” into this house, but I know we won't. We don't plan on living here forever, and have already decided that we want to move before we're 30. There are many reasons for this, but mainly because we bought this house when we were 20, and we already know that we want a different style house with more land soon (once we have more money and my student loan debt is paid).

Now, what were we thinking when we bought this house that we knew would be too big? I guess we knew that houses with less than 3 bedrooms are hard to sell in the Midwest housing market. So we had that in mind. And I guess we were also all about the square footage. We wanted something bigger and were preoccupied with that square foot number.

If we lived in a smaller house we could save money in numerous ways. Our electric and gas bills would be lower, we wouldn't be wasting as much and we wouldn't need as much stuff to fill up the space.

Now, I wish I could place a number on the amount of money that we wasted, but that would be hard. I live in the Midwest, so pretty much all houses are the same size as ours (or bigger), and there aren't many houses that are 2 bedroom. I do remember looking at one house that was around 700 square feet and we turned it down because we thought it was too small, but how can anything be too small for 2 people?

I do love my house though. It's nice, lots of space (which defeats the purpose of this post), has a decent amount of land and a backyard. But of course with the next place we plan on switching this up (and paying for most of it with cash when we have enough money).