Reply #64: 700 square feet heated only by a wood stove [View All]

[stevedeshazer]

My pop was a WW II vet. In about 1950 he bought a "defense house", a house left over from the shipbuilding era of WW II to temporarily house the tens of thousands of shipyard workers here in Portland OR and Vancouver, WA.

After he married my mom, he had the house trucked to property he bought from his dad. It was at the end of a dirt road, the kind that is two ruts with a big hump in the middle overgrown with weeds. I lived in that house until I was 14.

When I was three, Pop got some neighbors to help him build a barn out of lumber sawed on site by a saw hooked to a power take-off run by an Allis-Chalmers A-40 tractor. Needless to say, this was impressive to a little kid, and I still remember it nearly five decades later.

Today, my wife and I live in a solid old house (built in 1924) in a very progressive city that is <1600 sq. ft. It's like a palace to us.

The McMansions of today are a joke and a huge waste of resources.

However, I don't agree that kids should have to move out. My son lives here, and I've invited my elderly mom to live with us when she no longer can make it on her own. Extended family is the norm in human history. I find it strange that so many folks today reject that notion.