Buying a big house only means that you fill it with useless junk and pay a lot more to heat and cool the place. When I bought this place the first realtor did everything she could to get me to consider a 3K sqft mini-mansion when I was looking for 1K sqft and a basement. My house gains about 2% a year, but then again I did not lose 1/2 my home's value in the crash either. The big houses? They sit on the market for months, meanwhile homes in my 'working class' neighborhood in the sticks sell in 60 days because people can afford to live here. I'd love to break down and buy 40 or so acres, put a tiny house on the lot and build an observatory on a hill in the dark corner of the lot. Use the house as almost a mobile home, a place to crash after a night of astronomy. Some of these tiny houses cost more than my place, so I'd probably build my own in that event.
Friend of mine has a predilection for lofts. He used to have 3 roommates and 4500 square feet - half a floor of a factory in the fashion district. Skateboarding to the bathroom was a thing. There was this rug, and on it a couch, and surrounding it for about 40 feet in any direction was nothing. He's now got 1800 sqft on top of a former Masonic lodge; he's got a rug, and a couch, and a kitchen, and the rest of it you could park four cars with room to spare (if you could get them through the door, which you can't). So I totally get the appeal of vast swaths of empty. It happens to be woman-bane, though. The fair sex, in my experience, has little attraction to aircraft hangars. So yeah. A livable living space with enough accessory buildings to cover my hobbies and needs would be fine. Left to my own devices I'd have a shop shaped like an Ohmu and it'd be rad.
Can concur. I've lived in shitty places that were not much more than a roof, four walls, no leaks and decent neighbors all of whom understood we were living in a shit building. Know who lives in places like that? Single men saving to do some life goal, recently divorced guys making child support payments, immigrants who need a cheap place to live and not draw attention to themselves and maybe 1-2 women with nowhere else to go. And this is not the place with the vermin I've described elsewhere here, this place was on the border of "take a bullet monthly" and "not quite middle class but the schools don't suck." Those of you familiar with SoCal, and know where the Costa Mesa Freeway and the 405 come together can still see some of the places I used to live in a million years ago. There is something to be said for simplification like that... in a place like I just described you don't own many things because there is a real concern it will all be stolen as soon as you leave.It happens to be woman-bane, though. The fair sex, in my experience, has little attraction to aircraft hangars.
The useless junk expands to fill all available space. True of houses and hard drives.