Post your pictures of Waterloo Region!

[plam]

That is how it works in our society, and it's somewhat unfortunate, though it's true that I have more sqft than I know what to do with, really (but previously I had less sqft than I would have liked). Also: cars SUVs.

I actually disagree with this.

I mean, in theory, I think like most things, floor space is merely a matter of "enough". Once you have enough space, more doesn't add much (and can even hurt).

But if you are talking in practice in our society (because our society prioritizes size), then yeah, there's a lot of examples where people in bigger houses are clearly having a higher quality of life (living in a more expensive home, etc.) But I don't think this is universal, or even accurate most of the time, at least if you control for other factors like rate of pay.

People believe a lot of things which aren't true, a lot comes from advertising, but leaving aside the anti-capitalist point of view, I think that someone living in a smaller house, that has enough space, could easily be living a better life than someone in a bigger home, with more to maintain, more cleaning, more shoveling, more work of all kinds, plus higher costs for owning and maintaining, is likely working more hours. All this means more time working (domestically and for pay) and less time enjoying life. And that's before you even think about the improvements to quality of life when living in a smaller more urban home over a larger suburban home.

I think it's dubious at many levels to suggest bigger = better quality of life, even in our society. We are clearly conditioned to believe that, but I think it's fairly uncontroversial (at least by people who have a broad perspective) that people can have a perfectly good quality of life in smaller housing. We're looking at places in Amersfoort, and rarely do we even see a place over 1350 sq ft., but in NA that would be considered utterly tiny, and the people who live in them are happier than us on average. (FWIW..this lack of perspective goes both ways, I'm told Dutch people often remark how much they'd like to have all the space we have...what they don't consider is what we gave up to have it.)

Well, let me go and put my books back on my bookshelf that I don't really consult that often...

Basically, yes, it comes down to the question of maintenance cost. That can be paid in time or money, which are somewhat interchangeable. For instance I don't shovel (but I end up sweeping the excess salt that gets put onto my steps by the condo-provided contractors into the trash. It's annoying). There is more cleaning burden, sure (also somewhat imposed by society), which could be outsourced. And there is heating costs etc.

On the other hand, I could work less, but it's a fairly high-friction endeavour to change my appointment to, say, 66%. I don't know how true that is for most people. It's true at the margins; you might choose one job over another for quality-of-life issues. But many people are salaried and it's hard to just work more hours and directly get more income.

I think 1000sqft could be fine if properly laid out. My previous place had 1080 sqft but the layout was dominated by corridors and kind of terrible, really.

As you say, I don't think bigger is automatically better. It's complicated.