General Urban Waterloo Updates and Rumours

[danbrotherston]

Yikes those floor plans are tiny! To be fair they call them “purposefully crafted” in the brochure, but they omit saying the purpose is to maximize profit, not liveability.

Yes, but ... you really can live in under 400 sqft, if it's laid out well. Even two people can be happy there (of course, each person has different needs so this is not for everyone). But modern 1BR layouts aren't super efficient. Here is an example of two 390 sqft apartments (in Europe), one from 10 years ago, the other one 66 years ago. The old one has lots of doors but is actually much more functional than the current example.

Yeah, it really was remarkable to me how efficient homes here are with space. I have a ~1000 sq ft 3 bedroom home, but it feels larger than my 1700 sq ft 2 bedroom home in Canada which had a basement on top of that.

Now part of that is that it isn't bigger, and that is _sometimes_ annoying. We don't have a lot of storage space (a basement is hard to beat) and we do have a smaller house, but the Kitchen layout is much better, so it functions better despite being smaller, and the Living room is larger, but we have no dining room...but we used the dining room maybe 3 times in 4 years living there, so...better. And the main bedroom was HUGE in the house, and I had a seating arrangement there, that I used...well...never. So again, wasted space.

Now I'm not saying that a larger house wouldn't be more useful in some ways--I could use space for a second WFH office space--but given that the house is barely half the size, it's remarkable how close it is.