Wife uses a walker, and even crutches don’t help the pain in my hip. We’re fortunate to be able to afford a house keeper.
We now use only 1 of 4 bedrooms and 2 of 3 baths. Our house is less than half the size of others in the neighborhood! The neighborhood is what they call “Track housing”. 2000 + and growing, 50 years-old and up. What we call cooky cutter houses. There’s some 10 models per block. It’s like they copy/paste one block to the next.
Yes, we’re fortunate financially. The wife was a Critical Care Registered Flight Nurse, (Helicopter air ambulance) and I sold a cyber security firm in ‘08 when I retired. We paid 358,000 ANG for this place 20 years ago, and due to a housing crises, (not enough houses) our house is now worth 1,029,250.
September of next year my 2 grandsons can come out to pack and load our shit into a rental truck to move us, and we’re outta here. California is the 2nd most expensive place to live in the U.S. only after Hawaii. We’re moving to Tennessee in what we call the Midwest. We’ll be able to pay cash for a nice SINGLE story house for 447,500 ANG. $250,000. We have grand and great grand kids. Every penny saved goes to them in our will.
We’re looking for something around 360 sq meters. 2 bedrooms and 1 bath.
A whole lotta moons ago, I bought a house on Lake Michigan from a friend on a land contract, built in 1897. It’d been vacant around 20 years, then the City noticed it, as it needed some paint. He went over and mowed lawn from time to time, but couldn’t afford to paint it.
I paid $4,500 for it. Something like a little less than 3% interest, and a 6 year contract. According to google it was a little over 7% back then.
No kitchen or bathroom, a small dinning room behind a decent size living room and a pot belly stove.
A decent size bedroom, plenty big enough for our king size bed, with a large closet. 4 bedrooms and 2.5 baths? No, 1 bedroom no bath.
Kids slept in the living room. Hadda install a bedroom door.
Typical of the times it was an A frame. TALL peaked roof, to hold the 5’ plus snow and Icicles reaching the ground! Insulation? Yeah, no! Heating? That stove.
Dug a basement for a kitchen and bath, then the kids had a blast knocking out those THICK plaster walls with the lath behind it. Hot water? The stove. Installed insulation throughout the house. First time a house in the hood with insulation.
Added a decent size kitchen and typical bathroom of the times. SMALL!
Attic: Room enough for 2 large bedrooms. Shower? TF is that?
Installed a water heater, (Doncha hate it in 2025 when people call them hot water heaters? What, it is heating hot water?) and natural gas furnace. Had to install all the duct work.
Nicest home in the hood. 10 years later we sold it for the price of a new home. Something like $60,000. Water front property 'Ya know?
I think it took almost 3 years to do that renovation. Brother in law did the muding for the dry wall.
Oh, and an important lesson for anyone thinking of installing fiberglass insulation! Wash your hands BEFORE taking a piss! Or wear gloves. Dumb ass.
Interesting. @cloudycaptain . I got a notification that my quote of @SessionDrummer ‘s was automatically removed? ‘Sup wit’ dat’? Don’t wanna do it again if I did something wrong.
Then again, not so much. Pa built this in 1962! Only thing I see different is there was a porch with pillars holding up the over hang.
Was visiting one day when a hurricane rolled through and put one of the pillars through the picture window. Thank man for basements!
They had this HUGE rock in one corner of the back yard, in a corner near the fence. Pa asked me to help roll it to the other corner. Every night for I don’t know how many, we put a concrete block like you’d use to build a basement, shoved a long pipe under it and rolled it onto a side.
Not a 360 flip, we’re talking a 90. Didn’t pay me a dime! Helped him build a garage. Not a dime! Self proclaimed “frugal”. I think he was cheap.
@PaulyWalnuts it’s done automatically by the forum software. It seems time related. If someone posts, and you post with quoting them shortly after, the quote is removed. I’m guessing for “clarity”. Either way, it’s just what the forum software does. It seems that if the post you’re quoting is older, it lets it run.
I come past this every day. I looked inside not so long ago and it was empty. Not even a week later another tree sprouted inside. I first thought someone just put it in there to give the impression it came up by itself, but it was solidly rooted in place.
Sure as hell is, too much house! We now use 2 of 4 bedrooms. One is the master bedroom. (Just means it’s a waste of space) and the other is a room I call the dry dock. I build model wooden ships in there.
Some of the houses here in our neighborhood have a formal living room and a guest living room, a formal dinning room and a guest dinning room, 3 fireplaces, a common room used for what I can’t imagine, an office room. NOT a bedroom. It’s in a “common” area upstairs. 836.127 sq meters! The average American has 2.5 kids. TF you need that kinda space for? Just because you can afford that?
People here have Ferrari’s and other cars worth as much as a house in the Midwest! We USE to be able to afford a kinda nice car, but we chose to travel Europe in stead. Better use of our money.
We’re looking for housing in what we call the Midwest, to be closer to family. We have the eastern time zone, central, and pacific time zones. Midwest is central time, so they’re 2 hours ahead of us.
Then we retired. We were okay, but then California raised taxes on retirement income by 300%! Same with auto and home insurance! The states we’re looking to move to don’t tax retirement income at all.
But California has drained so much of our retirement funds, we’ll STILL be strapped for cash.
What we want, is 2 bedrooms and 1 bathroom. 2 beds 1 bath is still 111.484 sq. meters. Smallest house I’ve ever seen is 74.322 sq. meters. That’s considered TINY!
Hmm. I think I’m getting my sq feet to sq meter hosed. 2.54 feet in a meter.
We’re actually still making payments on this beast, even though I retired in '08! With what we owe vs what we’ll get for this place when we buy in the Midwest, we’ll be able to pay cash for our home. 1/3 the cost of this place!
You can get what we call a studio apartment. Essentially it’s an area with a small kitchenette, (enough room for a stove, dishwasher, sink and small counter) a small bathroom and a living room that also serves as the bedroom. Google futon. It’s a couch that spreads out to a small bed. These run around 27.871. No families in there! MAYBE a wife, but she’d make me sleep on the floor.
The east coast, especially New York, and California are the most expensive places to live.
What Country was that?
We have a state called Rhode Island and it’s the smallest at 1,214 sq miles. Again, I “think” that’s 1931 sq km. If I’m not mistaken, U.S. customary is, for example 2.54 cm per inch. Miles to Km? All I know is that in Canada, the speed limit is 100 km/hour. I didn’t know that the 1st time I went there. Cop let me go!
Ships like this that barely fit on the fireplace mantel. Like a meter square.
I live in the Netherlands, that’s 16,160 sq miles, I guess we could fit Rhode Island in there somewhere
This is not the same tree growing back. It’s the seed of a another kind that has taken root in the middle of the space. The trunk is completely hollow, you can see the ground when you look into it.
you can barely see it.
