Strangely Offended

[livingdeb]

The article Move Over, McMansions describes "microhouses" as "typically, houses spanning from a few hundred to a little more than a thousand square feet" and as "[r]anging between a mere 64 square feet to just over 1,200."

(In contrast, the average (American) house today has 2,400 square feet.)

Since my house has 960 square feet, I live in a (rather large) microhouse.

The article states that most people buying these exciting new kinds of houses are buying them as vacation homes or art studios or, if they are hippie freaks trying to reduce their footprint on the earth, as their only homes.

So, this implies that I am either some kind of freak or possibly some kind of person who is so hip with this new concept that I am already living it. I'm so not. I'm a little hippie-ish, but not very good at it.

I think I'm just hippie-ish enough to be offended. I think if the definition applied to houses of 64 to 400 square feet, I wouldn't be offended. But 800 to 1000 square feet is perfectly reasonable, especially for a single person or couple.

Since I even enjoyed living in a dorm room, I must be some kind of extremely bizarre type of person.

And what about these folks in Hong Kong who live in apartments that are 100 square feet? (That site is nothing but one picture of each person (or couple) in the room, apparently given no time to prepare for the shoot.) Most of these people seem to be having a hard time fitting everything into their space, but check out the guy pictured in #93! What minimalist living!

Comments

[llcoolvad.livejournal.com]

Oooh, those photos are amazing. So sad, so interesting -- I was mesmerized! Thanks for the link.

And I have stupid questions I wish I could ask someone, like why do most of them have the ducts across the back wall either taped up, covered with fabric, or stuffed with something? Is it to prevent light pollution? Noise? Smells? Maybe all of those things. But then, where does the heat come from? Is there heat? How do you stand not having a window?

It also looks like in many cases they have two sets of bunk beds, possibly implying four people per room? Gaah! that means you basically get 25 sq. ft. of living space? That's smaller than most prison cells in the U.S.

There were also several rooms that I couldn't actually find a surface that someone could be expected to sleep on, like #36. And #76 has nowhere to walk. They look more like my storage unit.

Come to think of it, my storage unit is 140 sq. ft...

[livingdeb.livejournal.com]

Based on my experience with old rental units, I'm guessing those vents at the back of the room are no longer attached to anything that works. It does look like virtually everyone has a fan.

A little web research shows me that the climate is "subtropical" with lows down to 50 (10C) in the winter and highs in the lower 90s (33C) in the summer. Also it's dry in the winter and humid in the summer. Hmm, maybe those vents are connected to heat, and sometimes the landlords go a little overboard with the heat?

I suspect there is a window or two on the front wall, with the door. The side and back walls we're seeing are probably walls shared with other apartments.

I decided the bunkbeds come in handy for storage. It looks like most people have their top bunk loaded down with belongings. I concluded, based on the number of people shown in each picture, that most of these places were for only one person, though a few of them had two people living there.

It looks like #36 was taken with the camera aimed at the corner. The typical bunkbeds may still be along the right wall.

Wow. I've clearly never looked at #76 before. Maybe that table leaf folds down?

I wonder if Hong Kong is the way I've heard New York is (or can be): you don't need living space inside your house (except for sleeping) because you can spend most of your time out in the city. You eat at restaurants and go to the theatre and museums and coffee shops.

What surprises me is that these are not young people moving up in the world who are living here. (Once when I was at an amusement park near the end of the season, I noticed that most of the employees looked like zombies and realized it must become mind-numbingly boring work. But I consoled myself that these are all youngsters who will move on. These guys don't look like they're moving on.)

[(Anonymous)]

As far as the "microhouse" trend goes, I think having a tiny house is only trendy if you can afford a giant house but get a tiny one because it's cool. Kind of like having old furniture is only cool if you chose it because it's some style that was only made in 1948 and it's the best one ever and you own books about it...not if you just happen to own a bunch of old crap and you don't want to replace it because it still works. And kind of like how sewing or knitting is trendy if you're a yuppie and you took it up on a lark, and not if you do it for reasons of economy.

Tam