Unless that third bedroom is already tiny, I'm always hopeful that its designation as a bedroom with a tiny closet can be kept. Some codes have that there must be so many square feet to become a bedroom, but I've never had to deal with that before. Even sacrificing some space in your current bath, making it a tiny bit smaller, and taking in half of the closet of your sacrificial bedroom and maybe a couple of square feet of floor area, would that leave you the bedroom? In our little 2/1 cottage, discovering mold in the plaster behind a vanity, launched me into a real whirl of bath remodeling. It lead to the smallest 3/4 bath in a house (smaller ones in a boat), and the relocation of the fixtures in the existing bath due to wood rot and NO floor under the ugly tub. Also, I had to tear out the existing closet for bedroom #2 so the new master suite could be created using that bath and a new walkin closet. This requires a bumpout to the bath and wall of the bedroom, which is where our project is now halted because the old contractor failed to return, and the new contractor has to finish his current prohject for British Petroleum. :/ But the message is, I lost 3 closets counting the linen closet in the hall, but we will have a lot more space to use with the 18 to 20 foot long bumpout along one wall with only a small extension of the roofline. Don't give up on having your cake and eating it too. With two bedrooms and two baths here, this house now would be a good rental for two roommates. But with THREE bedrooms and two baths, you would be in the single family home market. Everybody seems to want/need at least two toilets and sinks. It does not have to take up an entire bedroom.

We're selling smallish to buy smaller (and cheaper) in a less-nice town. DH just changed jobs because the stress was affecting his health, but the financial impact is pretty massive, so we're going to try to get the house on the market in a couple of months (the delay is for the "Designed to Sell" routine, as it would show quite poorly at this point). We've been told it may actually not be easy to sell our house because it is "so small" for a family house (4BR/2.5BA if we fix up the powder room) at 1900sf especially where prices are so high in my area. People think "if I'm going to pay this ridiculous amount (say $350k) for a house I want this and this and this and this" even though that amount of money doesn't get you a whole heck of a lot in this town! It's a mental block. The average 4BR/2.5BA here has half again more square footage than this house. It's a very good thing that I don't need/want more space because there's very little even as big as we have now in our price range. Everything I'm looking at is about a third smaller; call me a space hog, but I doubt I can hack any less than half the space we have now even though there would be some lovely houses for the taking. When DH and I had a 900sf condo we were constantly in each other's hair, we had use of 1200sf of the house we rented and that was just right. We both need our privacy and when we do fight we both need someplace to go to get away from each other without leaving the house, we both have major emotional baggage about leaving the house during a fight. We also live on different schedules, I am a "night owl" and he is a "lark", and in too-tight quarters we wake each other up. I am hoping for fewer, larger rooms than we have now so that our furniture actually fits into them properly; the rental house had big open spaces so the scale of the furniture had to be bigger, and we couldn't afford to just ditch it because it was too snug in this one. I'm actually looking forward to having the EXCUSE to ruthlessly prune our possessions, get rid of some of the CRAP we have accumulated. We're not even acquisitive people! But the Law of Storage is that "stuff expands to fill all the available space to store it"... LOL It'll be mortgaged, of course, I don't know ANYONE who could buy a house without a mortgage. (Considering a freakin' trailer can bring a quarter of a million dollars in my town...) But I need to be able to make the mortgage payment without hyperventilating.

When we first moved to Colorado from NY in 1990 we purchased a 1200 4 bedroom 2 bath house. We had 3 kids and since it was our first house together we had no gauge for how big was big. To us, since we were just starting out 1200 felt huge! Once we moved in though we realized for 5 people it was tight. One of the problems though was the layout of the house, 3 or 2 bedrooms and more living space would have probably worked out much better. So we moved into a larger house about 10 years ago which is 1850. I always wanted a formal dining room and den, so now it is just 3 of us (we have a 7 year old son, and the older kids are grown and have homes of their own now) and to be honest it feels "huge". I actually got rid of our dining room set and we never use that space. The extra living room area never really gets used much either. We have a rental that is 850-900 (2 bedroom, 1 bath) that eventually i want to move into. My husband thinks our current house is perfect for us, i would eventually like to downsize to our rental. Maybe he is right but for me, cleaning this house is a lot of work. Sometimes i feel like moving from our smaller house to begin with was a mistake. In retrospect, while it was a bit cramped, our smaller home was cozy and had a really wonderful backyard with a covered patio that i missed once we moved. While I do love our current home sometimes it just feels way too big for 3 people.

My in-laws are in their late 50s and early 60s. They’re in great health now, but we could easily be living here for another 20 years. The guest house (aka: cottage, casita, adu, granny flat, in-law unit) is at the rear of the yard. There’s a flat pathway from front to back. The yard is nearly all cement, which will be tackled in ~2 years from now, but we’ll be sure to keep an early level walkway. Prompted by this discussion, I asked my in-laws about wheel chair access to make sure we are properly considering the future, but they don’t want that kind of space. Cross our fingers it doesn’t come to that, but we are planning for a space that will work with a walker. If they are wheel chair bound, we’ll get help. Their priorities for the unit are: #1 an open layout between kitchen, dining, living - they want to keep that area as large as possible #2 access to the bathroom from the bedroom #3 I’m not sure what’s more important, but they want a decent amount of closet space and a small office space (think 3ft x 3ft corner hutch) I think we can do it :-)