Re: How I Got Here: Melanie Mason
I liked Melanie Mason before; I like her even more now. I thought Melanie Mason was smart before; I think she’s even smarter now.
Seven-hundred-and-eighty square feet is plenty of space for a family of four! We did it in less than 1,000 and Joldine and I are both packrats. The nice thing about having a house that’s too small is that the kids, when they ‘come of an age’, are only too happy to leave.
Sure, the place was a hovel when we moved in 20 years ago, and it’s a hovel now. But the neighbours are used to it. When I say ‘hovel’, I mean by Bowen Island standards. By global standards (the only sensible standard), it’s a palace — it has inside plumbing and lights that turn on.
I remember reading a story about a Ukrainian couple who emigrated to Canada when the prairies were being settled (early 1900s), who raised their their daughters in a one-room sod house. Those sorts of stories are not unusual. Currently, UN-Habitat estimates that the number of people living in slum conditions is 863 million (up from 760 million in 2000 and 650 million in 1990), in housing they cobble together out of whatever materials they can lay their hands on.
It’s all about perspective. And my brother-in-law told me about growing up in a two-bedroom house on a farm: the parents got one room, the two oldest boys got the other room, and the youngest boy slept on the stair landing. Now, of course, he and my sister, who never had kids, live in a 3,000+ square foot house. It’s a nice house; but all I can think about is the dusting.
I was chatting with a project manager on-site a week or two back who got his planning degree in Ireland and he said families of 10 living in four-bedroom townhouses were not unusual. The secret? Bunkbeds! And what about Murphy beds – one of the greatest inventions of all time. Remember those?
In his words, if you drive a car with an engine bigger than 2 or 2.5 litres ‘they tax you up the a**’. Small is beautiful. And cheap(er). We never had two cars: I rode the bus and wore the same pair of pants for 20 years, and paid off the house.
Melanie Mason, you’re fated to be a rich woman someday!
I always resisted the pressure to ‘renovate’ to the tune of 200k, and I’m glad for it now. Gee, I love that smell of ‘no debt’ in the morning.
When we visited Joldine’s relatives in Korea 20-odd years ago, they put all their futons and bedding away in cupboards during the day. Voila! You just doubled your living area. And these were affluent people — they had just never gotten into the habit of wasting anything, including space.
The problem is, developers won’t build small houses on small lots — not enough profit in it for them. Just like in restaurants where they charge you $20 for a plate of food that’s twice as big as you need, when all you wanted was a $10 plate. You can take half the food home for later, but as likely as not you’ll just overeat. Fat people in houses that are way too big — that’s what we’ve come to.
But that’s another rant for another day.
Michael Epp
Architect, AIBC
