Re:Americans Are Pretty Skeptical That Hard Work Will Pay Off
by danans on Tuesday June 22, 2021 @07:27PM
(#27598687)
> A 2,500 sqft typical suburban US house built after, IDK, 2005, may well not feel bigger than a 1,700 sqft house built with more rooms and more thought to how to best use the space.
It's too bad, because you can have tremendous wow factor in a smaller but very smartly designed space.
But indeed the cheapest form of wow factor is to supersize the house. This is cheap in design expenditure (AKA less "thought" in the design), but not cheap in in the amount of materials used.
In these cases lower quality materials - i.e. non-structural paper-based sheathing, flimsy weather barrier materials, etc - are often used to compensate for the huge size.
It's too bad, because you can have tremendous wow factor in a smaller but very smartly designed space.
But indeed the cheapest form of wow factor is to supersize the house. This is cheap in design expenditure (AKA less "thought" in the design), but not cheap in in the amount of materials used.
In these cases lower quality materials - i.e. non-structural paper-based sheathing, flimsy weather barrier materials, etc - are often used to compensate for the huge size.