Large House vs Small House

Most of you following this blog will know that we are making the shift from a small rental house to an un petite bus-house. A bus-house with an uber generous 23 square metres of living space on board.

Australia has one of the largest house sizes in the world with free standing house sizes sitting at about 243m2.  With an average of only 2.66 people living in these large houses that leaves a lot of free space.

While the UK has a very small house size (at an average of 76m2). That popular program Grand Designs often raises the hopeless case of their upper-middle-class renovators and self builders in finding those ‘hard to find’ bits of land for their dream houses, these people manage, in increasingly creative ways, to fill vacant blocks with floors and walls and rooves. These vacuous spaces are then relegated to housing just a couple of bodies on a regular basis.

In an increasingly populated world people seem to continue to want their own space.

Australia has a lot of space and I guess that is why our homes are bigger, but to what end?

What is the use of these large expanses of dead space, which are designed to consume things instead of produce things?

I have been resisting normalised compulsive spending urges since knowing we were drastically reducing our house size.

In a home this tiny every little object matters and every square centimetre of storage must be seized upon. The ‘bedrooms’ are only as large as they need to be. Both kids have a private space, their bunks, which equal about 2 square metres each, with room enough only to sit. Every part of the bus is shared, except for the drivers seat, we have only one table with enough room only for us four, and there is one lounge.  Our living space however will be huge. It will be the great Australian outdoors. In this bus the outdoors are very close. I was sitting in it yesterday while the rain poured down and it felt very much like I was sitting inside a waterfall. It was beautiful and sensory and I relish that kind of living.

Downsizing does not feel cramped or like a negative lifestyle shift. It is better! It is better than living where we were. With a cut in living space comes a closeness to the outdoors and a reduction in things that we never really needed in the first place.  Cutting down on space, and ergo things, should not scare anyone. It is quite liberating.

A big benefit of renovating a very small area is the way in which we can inject quality into it.  Rather than a big kitchen, for example, we can have a well designed, well made kitchen with a high standard of materials.

This last point is very important to me in my quest for a sustainable life. Ultimately a sustainable life is not fast or big or full of things or expensive, but it is a life of excellence. That is the strength of sustainable living.

I would be rather interested to see the trend of housing in Australia in the future. I wonder if a nomadic lifestyle, like ours, might become more popular as house prices continue to soar, I hope people will learn to live in smaller spaces, leaving more room to live outside.