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So you've gone ahead and bought a house and graciously accepted all the housewarming gifts and the generous extra help from friends and families. Now, you've decided that is not the life for you. What to do? Well, start by asking auntie's advice.

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But Changed should also know this: secretly, everybody else is always so relieved and happy to hear that you have changed your minds. Everybody else is often tempted to change his/her mind, but everybody else is usually feeling just as sheepish as you are about doing that, especially in public.

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We spent countless hours convincing ourselves, our friends and our families that buying a home with two bathrooms, numerous bedrooms, a garage and a large yard was the way for the two of us to make our dream a reality.

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What is it with people these days? Why do two people need the amount of space you could have raised a large family in a generation or two ago?

I'm a Saskatchewan boy, and I am very distressed at the housing situation in both Saskatoon and Regina which is only exacerbated by the gutting of our cores and expansion outwards.

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Originally posted by Privateer:
In the last 10 years a lot of this crap has been built around Halifax. City hall is finally trying to stop it as it can't afford to service such excess. Hundreds of acres of land to house only a few dozen families of two or three people each. Makes me want to retch.

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We've also added a play space, a woodworking shop (a very compact one) and a laundry/utility/mucking about/food-storage room into the basement, which was mostly unused when we moved in. I don't think there is any space in the house that isn't regularly used.

My first house was 980 sqft, a nice two bedroom bungalow. It was manageable with one kid, but the basement office was pretty dismal to work in. Add kid #2, and it was going to be very tight. I know we could have managed, but it would have been a stress.

I don't like seeing the suburbs expanding like they are, and I see the wisdom in more high-density housing. Although we do live just off the core of downtown, I still wouldn't want to give up having a yard or the amount of space that we have. I really love my house and garden.

edited to add: The couple in auntie's letter sound a lot like the woman we bought this house from -- she lived here alone, save for two really nasty guard dogs (we had to give advance notice to come see the house so we could be sure they were secured before we got there). It's an old house, built in the early teens, and consequently needs a lot of tlc. I suspect there was a divorce involved, since her name was different on some of the documents, and that she sold because she just couldn't keep up with it all alone. Kind of sad.

[ 06 June 2005: Message edited by: Zoot ]

The other spare bedroom is for mother in law visits that may, at some time, turn into mother in law come to live with us (either one). So we had to buy a house with these bedrooms just in case.

But if any space in the house isn't propertly utilized or has some reason for being, it bothers me. I grew up with friends and relatives (and this is maybe very USian) who had "living rooms" where no one did any living. That is, they were museums inside the house where the most expensive furniture was kept and the most expensive knick knacks as well. In my grandmother's old house, the stereotype was in full flower - the furniture was covered in plastic sheeting. Kids weren't allowed to sit or touch anything and neither were grownups unless it was Christmas or Easter.

In other homes I'd come to play, the "living room" was one we just walked by and looked at and went on to our designated play area. I just never understood why you would dress up a room in a home for show and almost never use it. It rubbed me the wrong way then and it still does today.

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I grew up with friends and relatives (and this is maybe very USian) who had "living rooms" where no one did any living.

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This was very common in the Maritimes, AE -- and I suspect in other parts of Canada as well. Not at my house, I'm happy to report, but I knew such places.

But your description of the furniture is much different from what I remember: old, uncomfortable horsehair chesterfields and chairs, heavy marble-topped tables, dark upright pianos, lace doilies and antimacassars.

A couple of weeks ago the framing of one of the houses seemed complete, but there was a large stack of oddly shaped roof trusses remaining on the site. I couldn't figure for the life of me how they could be part of the structure, so assumed they had been delivered by mistake and would be a part of one of the as yet unstarted units.

I was amazed the next day st see them hoisted onto the purfectly fine roofline, and installed as part of huge false roof that made the structure look twice the size of before.

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Originally posted by Sharon:

This was very common in the Maritimes, AE -- and I suspect in other parts of Canada as well. Not at my house, I'm happy to report, but I knew such places.

But your description of the furniture is much different from what I remember: old, uncomfortable horsehair chesterfields and chairs, heavy marble-topped tables, dark upright pianos, lace doilies and antimacassars.

And no, you weren't allowed to go in there and touch anything. It was often called the "parlour."

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It's very common here, too. Houses are actually being designed with a "formal living room" and what they are now calling a "great room", which I suppose would have been previously called a family or rumpus room.

Most of the living rooms in show homes are laid out in a completely impractical way, with very high ceilings and are meant to be designed to the teeth, ie in the showiest way possible. They aren't really meant to be used.

I remember the advent of the "family room" in the '70s, and all my family's friends, and eventually my own parents abandoning the living rooms except on special occasions. The tv went to the family room, usually down in the basement, and everybody seemed to follow it. I thought it was a fairly nifty arrangement, as I then had the living room all to myself, a quiet place to read.

I now live in the 'burbs in Calgary with a bunch of stuck up people who only talk about their portfolios and the colour of their next enormous SUV.

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while the actual household food production - canning, making sausages, etc goes on in the twin basement kitchen.

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A couple of weeks ago the framing of one of the houses seemed complete, but there was a large stack of oddly shaped roof trusses remaining on the site. I couldn't figure for the life of me how they could be part of the structure, so assumed they had been delivered by mistake and would be a part of one of the as yet unstarted units.

I was amazed the next day st see them hoisted onto the purfectly fine roofline, and installed as part of huge false roof that made the structure look twice the size of before.

Absolutely wasted space; a complete waste of lumber, plywood, roofing and gable cladding. Plus, it creates a much more complicated rook design with lots of valleys and other potential "leak spots". Nuts. [/QB]

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I can relate. I don't know if these are popular in Canada but homes that look like this are all the rage of the arriviste here in Cedar Rapids.:

Voila! The American Dream. Ugly As Shit, ain't it?

Love the soaring gothic garage. Nothing says "I've arrived" more than that. And this is a high end new home.

I think we can thank house porn for this kind of crap. House porn being all those interior design and decorating shows. I've noticed that those kind of shows often fly a little more under the radar of many progressive people who find themselves getting caught up in tons of home improvement stuff. Maybe it's because a lot of the shows seem kind of artsy and creative, the rampant consumerism of them is a little more easily hidden.

I also have to wonder -- those families that raised 4 or 5 kids in a two-bedroom house -- would they have done it that way if they'd had the option? I'm betting they'd have gone for a larger house if it had been affordable.

And inside... To make these monsters remotely affordable, the materials and workmanship have to be cheap. The overwhelming effect is thus - surprise! - cheapness. And yet the intention is to look high class. It's pathetic.

On the other hand, when you go small, you can afford better materials and workmanship.

To maximize space, when we renovated we pushed the front of the "cheapest house on the block" forward as far as allowable. No front yard to speak of, but instead a very pretty entranceway with a tree and landscaping (I'm partial to wild grasses) that can be lit at night. The house is L shaped, so around back is a kind of large and very peaceful courtyard effect, which I'd noticed in Europe. There's a modest sized lawn, a garden and greenhouse, more wild grasses and bamboo, a hammock, and a long harvest table under a tree which is accessed straight from the kitchen. It's not at all a big house, but it's designed to feel much bigger than it is. Because we work from home, we not only needed two offices, but a way to avoid cabin fever. The place had to be a sanctuary. We invested in a good architect/designer (and a contractor sensitive to "green" issues) and went minimal with furnishings. Just the way minimal cooking means each ingredient is crucial, we had to be very careful about the interior so it didn't look cold. So texture and colour became very important. You really start to notice things when you go small! When it's not about the amount of square footage, you have to pay attention to the quality of each square foot, or all you'll end up with is an oppressive little house, not a home.

[ 08 June 2005: Message edited by: bittersweet ]

I used to live near Christie and Bloor (Garnet Ave) and it had that type of set up. Lots of 3 story brick places, with porches. The neigbours were all great....Italian and Portugese sitting out on the porches in the hot summer nights drinking vino and chatting.

There was this older Jewish widow we would help with yard work and shoveling snow in the winter. She'd always force feed us unhuman amounts of food which was good because I was a student at the time.

I do find the idea of having a turret very interesting though. Maybe someday we'll find a Victorian fixer upper with one. With my luck, it'll probably be haunted.

Edited to add: Does anybody else watch Holmes on Homes?

[ 08 June 2005: Message edited by: Zoot ]

I can't watch very many design shows, I have to admit. "Designed" spaces read cold to me, or stuffy and cluttered. TOO coordinated. No real personality. I only like the how-to shows, and not all of them.

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I purposely bought an older home and don't regret it. Its amazing when I compare heating bills with people in new houses with all the latest improvements and find out they are still spending more for heating than I am (and my house needs many improvements).

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Originally posted by Rufus Polson:
So she had the person go buy a bunch of old books, then Cut Off The Spines and glued the spines by themselves into this bookshelfy thing. Shock! Horror!

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House porn on trading spaces - anything Hildy does.

As for hauntings, I believed the house I live in now had the spirit of the first owner around for awhile after we moved in. I finally told him to scram, that we would take care of the place and that was it. Seriously, some times you can just feel it. Everyone thinks I'm nuts about that but I definately felt it then but certainly not now.

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Originally posted by Michelle:
Good GOD. And can you imagine if you were to do the "entertaining" that you're supposed to do after your house is oh so perfect, how stupid you'd look when your visitors wander over to your bookshelf and say, "Oh, wow, what a collection of books you have - this one looks intere -- um...Michelle, what's up with the fake books?"

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Yeah, or even worse, 'Michelle, that's an 1876 translation of Ars Magna! One of those sold on e-bay for FOUR THOUSAND... Oh. I saw that episode too.'

[ 08 June 2005: Message edited by: Anchoress ]

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This was very common in the Maritimes, AE -- and I suspect in other parts of Canada as well. Not at my house, I'm happy to report, but I knew such places.

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Certainly not unknown in the Ottawa Valley, either. Where, at many houses, the front door is never used, though maybe a few naive salespeople will try it.

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I do find the idea of having a turret very interesting though. Maybe someday we'll find a Victorian fixer upper with one. With my luck, it'll probably be haunted.

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In Victoria I lived for a while in a beautiful old Victorian -- OK, Edwardian house with a turret, which was actually my kitchen. Nice place, even though the rent was steep.

If the house was haunted, the ghost must have appeared in another suite or suites. However, the three-bedroom bungalow I grew up in was haunted by the ghost of... a creek.

Our subdivision, on the edge of a small town, was just being finished when we moved in. Previously, there'd been a creek running through the area, which was then diverted around it. The watercourse had run through the lot that became ours.

Whenever you divert a river, stream or creek of any size, it will tend to resume its old course. Every spring, the creek remembered the good old days of freedom. Not that it flooded -- though during one exciting spring, thanks to an ice jam, it very nearly did -- but, thanks to the seepage of groundwater that had formerly fed the creek, our basement would fill with six inches or more of water.

Of such formative experiences are hydrogeologists made.

[ 08 June 2005: Message edited by: 'lance ]

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Does anyone else ever get that feeling about a presence in a house? Please say yes.

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Yes.

Really, though, I do sometimes. My mother says we lived in a haunted house when I was about 3 yrs old. Things would move, change position overnight. Mom felt a presence in the kitchen sometimes, warm and comforting presence, though. And I had my one and only imaginary friend. My mother still thinks that I was the only one who could see the ghost, and was friends with it. The house is only a few blocks from here. I went to a garage/yard/house sale there last summer, and was inside for about 15 minutes. Didn't feel anything all that unusual, although I remembered the stair banister and playing peek-a-boo through it.

I've gotten the odd sense of presence in some places at other times. The strongest was when I was at an arts camp in my teens. The building was an old TB sanitarium. Every morning at about 6:00, something would brush by my bed, moving from the hallway door to the sun-porch door, and wake me up.

In my teens when I came home alone at night I couldn't wait to turn every light on the first floor on. Every. one.

Things happened, Noises, mounted plates and knickknacks moved. Stuff I can't explain. My father became a believer on night after falling asleep on the couch. He woke to something on top of him that wouldn't let him move. My mum told me about it the next day. I went down to breakfast and make a joke about it. Dad nearly tore my head off. He was an ex-Marine and afraid of nothing. I saw the look on his face and I knew.

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Certainly not unknown in the Ottawa Valley, either. Where, at many houses, the front door is never used, though maybe a few naive salespeople will try it.

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They don't mind you going to the side or back door, its not really about evasion, its just a cultural thing.

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Originally posted by Rufus Polson:
I was driven over the edge to the conclusion house porn was evil, evil, evil when on this one show, the decorator person wanted an intellectualish look for this room. So she had the person go buy a bunch of old books, then Cut Off The Spines and glued the spines by themselves into this bookshelfy thing.

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Yeah, that's pretty barfy. I like our 1100 square foot house just fine!

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So you didn't get the seven bedroom house you initially wanted?

House Lust

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Yeah, that's pretty barfy. I like our 1100 square foot house just fine!

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In the days before HGTV house porn, I lived with my ex-husband (a voracious reader) in status-conscious Dallas, Texas. The main downtown branch of the Dallas Public Library held a used book sale every summer. Some of the books were from discontinued library stock, others were contributed by library patrons and businesses.

The sale was a readers' delight - particularly if one was a connisseur of old history and science books. It was on the annual 'must do' list, since both of us are voracious readers.

One afternoon, my ex went to the sale alone after work. He reported that there seemed to be a ton of old legal books (Southwestern Reporters) that year. They were pratically flying off the shelves and out the door.

He asked one of the library volunteers why these outdated case law books were so popular. He was told that a lot of status-obsessed Yuppies liked to use them to decorate their bookshelves. The library volunteer mused her opinion that the Yuppies were trying to cultivate the impression that they were smart people with good taste.

Most of the sorts buying these books aren't smart enough to know how to use them, and don't necessarily have good taste, just plenty of coin. How pretentious is that?

Not long afterward, I stopped to buy some meats at a small German specialty grocery in a very tony part of town. The butcher invited me to sample a morsel of imported German Braunschweiger (a very high quality liver sausage pate).
Impressive tasting stuff, this Braunschweiger. At $20 per pound (USD) it should have been.

"Doesn't it taste like foie gras?" he asked.

Anybody who thinks they're somebody always serves foie gras at Dallas cocktail parties. Obviously, I was hanging around with the wrong sort of people, because I hadn't eaten foie gras in well over a decade. It did taste somewhat like foie gras!

The butcher confessed that he was making a ton of money selling this particular Braunschweiger to local socialites and wanna-bes. They substituted this stuff for the real thing to their impressionable guests, most of whom never guessed that they were eating German Braunschweiger instead of the the real $50 to $500 thing.

As I walked out of the store (a pound of $20 Braunschweiger and other goodies in hand), I couldn't help but wonder if those party hosts were the same people who bought all those nice case books to decorate their bookshelves.

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Originally posted by Coyote:
I think we need to find some kind of incentive to reduce or eliminate urban sprawl, and it starts with making urban cores liveable and affordable.

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Originally posted by andrean:
but they do occasionally have some very clever storage ideas. I'm a fan of clever storage ideas.

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Originally posted by Bacchus:
Its amazing how many people are coming to us and saying 2300? thats it? You sure you can fit everything in it?

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Originally posted by Privateer:
Is giving gifts to new homeowners that common. I mean we had help from family in buying our place but its not like we're getting married. Anyhow this is the line that stood out for me:

What is it with people these days? Why do two people need the amount of space you could have raised a large family in a generation or two ago?

I've talked about this before; how in Halifax huge houses are being constructed on multi-acre lots even though the typical family size is less than three people. At the same time, others live in cardboard boxes choking on the car exhaust from the multiple-cars these Yuppies own and commute in for hours everyday so they can live in excessive space on the edge of town. That's my rant for the day.

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Too true.

Our last apartment? 900 sq feet.

Our "new" (to us) house? 900 sq feet.

Hopefully we will be raising a child within these terribly confining walls as well..

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Originally posted by Gir Draxon:

Livable yes, but I disagree on affordable. The fact is that "yuppies" making good money as professionals are NOT going to concede to living in some stupid $400/month shoebox in a run-down building. If you want those kind of people living closer to the centre of town, you're calling for gentrification. They are going to want to live in a nice place, and why shouldn't they? Well, if you insist on making downtown "affordable" you're never going to see nice places there.

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For shame: no private bathroom for junior! Will have to learn how to SHARE.

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Given my student loans and late start in my career, I don't have a bundle to spend but better I keep the equity rather than pay it to some landlord. I am a young professional but not one who has a lot of wealth.

I'm noticing a lot of vacant lots in North Central, which for CBC fans is the area "Moccaison Flats" is shot in, and quite a number of homes for sale. I've also heard there are a bunch of crappy rental homes being condemned and bulldozed. I will probably buy on the fringes of this area, the houses are not pricey and the urban drama is in easy walking distance but not right on the doorstep - that much I can afford. Urban Renewal is a concept I find fascinating, but it just tends to move problems, this will be interesting.

Zoot, your comment on 90 year old houses lightened my heart.

I like the house porn because it will help me to make good decisions, but once I am all set I will stop watching it. I know I became less of a clothes-horse after I stopped reading Details and GQ.

All this said, House buying is very scary.

[ 10 July 2005: Message edited by: Deep Dish ]