First, some more wit n' wisdom from Mad magazine. This is from "The Lighter Side of...", one of the magazine's longest-running regular pieces. It was the creation of cartoonist Dave Berg. Even though this particular strip here was from 1972, it's still relevant today.
Leave it to kids (and Mad) to point out the world's hypocrisy!
When I was growing up, my mother complained how there was "no room" in our house. It would always shock my friends when I told them that, because our house was HUGE. We had one of the very few houses in the whole neighborhood with four levels.
The problem laid in how that space was distributed. We had 3 tiny bedrooms, and taking up almost half the house was a living room whose purpose was...nothing!
The ceiling must have been over 20 feet in one corner. In that high corner there was a light bulb which had probably been there since before 1976. Though that light was rarely turned on, for fear that the bulb would go out and have to be replaced. So in other words, we never turned on the light, for fear that we eventually wouldn't be able to turn it on. Go figure. That corner was also where we had the out-of-tune piano. The only other notable features of that warehouse of a room were the house's thermostat, the big dining table for holiday family gatherings (2 or 3 times a year tops), and the china cabinet of stuff too good to use.
As I said in an earlier blog, my problem isn't that I just need a bigger home for my stuff. Because as I said, I know that I would just end up filling the house just the same. But is this the true luxury of living in a house instead of an apartment? To be able to have big rooms that serve no practical purpose, except on Thanksgiving and Xmas? Yes, I DO understand the concept of aesthetics. Yes, I do believe that aesthetics outweigh practicality in some instances. But from a clutter perspective, I say that if you have rooms you never use for months at a time, yet cause an avalanche when you open your bedroom closet, then something is wrong.
My parents retired down to Florida some years ago, and they moved into house that was just a fraction of this size. At first, I didn't know how they were going to do it. But when I thought about my old bedroom minus the old bedrooms of my siblings, and minus the enormous dining room and half of the kitchen, it works out to about the same.
