Tag: house

Boomers in the House: Square Footage Changes With the Generations

Mister Boomer has to admit that he is hooked on TV home improvement and real estate shows. He finds it especially amusing when the show features young couples looking for their first home. They dutifully compose their “must have” lists of renovated kitchens with granite countertops and at least two bathrooms, then the real estate agent shows them the reality of what they can afford.

From a boomer standpoint, that’s where it really gets interesting. Visiting mature neighborhoods of bungalows, Cape Cods and ranch models, the couple walks through homes — homes of the sort boomers grew up in — with shock and horror. Inevitably, one of them remarks that the “rooms are so small,” and “there is no closet space.” The fact of the matter is, from their perspective, you can’t argue with that. The square footage of the average house has changed dramatically since the 1950s, when housing was being built to accommodate boomer families.

The average size of a house built in 1950 was around 1,000 sq. ft. That usually encompassed two to three bedrooms, the kitchen, living and dining rooms and one bathroom. By 1960, the average home size had increased to around 1,200 sq. ft. In both decades, that size would house a family of four or more. It was quite common for children of the same sex to share a bedroom, which caused an explosion of the sale of bunk beds for boomers.

By 1970, the average house size had increased to around 1,500 sq. ft. Yet for most boomers, there was still only one bathroom and shared bedrooms. Contrast these house sizes of the boomer era with that of the last decade. In 2011, the average square footage of a new house dropped. Most people attributed the drop to an economic slump. It had reached a high of 2,629 sq. ft. at the beginning of 2011, but by the end, had dropped to 2,343 sq. ft. Nonetheless, that’s double the size of the houses boomers called home.

Mister Boomer was three months old when his family moved into a 900 sq. ft. ranch home that was built in 1945. Part of a subdivision that jutted into the surrounding farmland, the house was a prime example of the type of housing that was quickly constructed near the end of the War in expectation of returning troops. His family would be the second owners. Three bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen and a dining room made up the floor plan. No sooner had Mister B turned three than his boomer sister arrived. That sealed the deal in terms of Mister B ever getting a room of his own. From that point on he shared a 10 foot x 10 foot room with his brother. In the early days, when the boys were very young, the room was jam-packed with two single beds and two dressers. In the early-’60s his parents bought bunk beds, then as the boys moved up the school ladder, a desk was added to the room (thanks to S&H Green Stamps).

And that’s the way it was for most boomers: smaller bedrooms, often shared (to say nothing of the closet), and one bathroom per family. The kitchen — usually a walled room of its own — was the place where the one home phone was mounted on the wall. The dining room was where family meals were consumed. Flash forward to our young househunters and the contrast is striking from their eyes. Formal dining rooms seem like a waste of space with respect to today’s lifestyle. One bathroom is a deal-breaker. And room size, well, maybe it would suffice as a home office, but a bedroom? With such a small closet? Einstein said time is relative, but when it comes to house size, that relativity is clearly based on the generation in which a person was born.

What role did house square footage play in your boomer years?

Please note: This is an edited version of a post first published by Mister Boomer on October 1, 2012.

Boomers and the Singularity: One Was the Only Number — Part 2

We’ve talked about how baby boomers grew up with a series of ones in their households: one TV, one car and one dinner time. Now here’s two more “ones” in the lives of boomers: one telephone and one bathroom.

Before the War, telephones were, for the most part, reserved for use as a means of communication, often used to deliver bad news. People rarely used it just to chat. That began to change in the 1940s, but really picked up steam when baby boomers reached their pre-teen years. It became a running joke for TV sitcoms, and a source of frustration for families everywhere. The reason for the frustration was that if one family member was on the phone for extended periods of time, and there was only one phone in the house, no one else could use it.

More often than not, the family telephone was attached to the wall in or around the kitchen. By replacing the curlicue cord that fixed the handset to the phone’s body with a longer cord, the talker could sit at a counter or table, or wander around the kitchen. This would infuriate family members even more as one person after another navigated around or under the stretched cord. Throughout this nightly dance, pleas of “Get off the phone!” could be heard by parents and siblings alike, uttered in every possible degree of decibels, from a whimper to a scream.

Some say it was the Princess touch-tone phone of the 1960s that helped change the one-phone household. Whatever the reason, it took at least a decade to really catch on. By the early 1970s, more families began to install a second phone, but with only one line, problems of phone usage still occurred.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgK2ttxLYeo

However, if there was anything that caused more frustration than one phone in growing boomer families, it was one bathroom. As boomers grew, along with their brothers and sisters, small suburban homes got proportionately smaller. Families often consisted of two or more children, so competition for the one bathroom was nothing less than intense when getting ready for school in the morning. Then during the evening hours or on weekends, the distinct cry of the Cross-Legged Boomer Whiner echoed throughout the house: “C’mo-o-o-o-o-o-n-n-n! I gotta go-o-o-o-o!”

Mister Boomer’s family fit this “one” category, with just one telephone and one bathroom for a family of five. The phone was parked on the kitchen wall. The kitchen was a separate room, and the phone was just to the right when you walked through the doorway. If mom was cooking, it was pretty tight in the space so if you liked to roam while talking, you were out of luck. And privacy? There was no such thing.

Mister B’s mother did a fair bit of chatting herself. Whether she called neighbors or family, she held the record for the longest conversations. Mister B didn’t use the phone much. Somehow he adopted an “old school” view of it as a tool to arrange meetings with friends or, say “hi” to aunts and uncles or, later on, a way to attempt to arrange a date. His brother and sister were the main phone abusers. As the oldest, Brother Boomer could talk and talk with his current love interest, but by the time he was seventeen he was rarely home. That’s when Mister B’s sister picked up the slack, talking to friends. Nonetheless, compared to some homes, ours was probably very low on the scale when it came to phone usage. In the early ’60s the family had a party line, so it was difficult to even get a clear line to make a call anyway.

While the one phone didn’t faze Mister B much, having one bathroom was another story altogether. Between a father who could fall asleep on the throne to a sister who used the room as her personal library, it was tough. Then there were Mister B’s mom doing home perms, and Brother Boomer’s Canoe and High Karate days when he would take an hour to get ready for a date. It was a very good thing that the room had a window that opened.

They say you can get used to anything, and that the physical closeness of our boomer families in smaller houses and rooms only made us closer to each other, but Mister B begs to differ. One phone — and especially one bathroom — can drive a family just plain nuts. One can only imagine how today’s families might respond if forced to share a single bathroom. Why, the children might think they were being punished — or, worse — that they were poor!

How did your family deal with a bad case of the “ones,” boomers? Or were you lucky enough to have more than one?