From tiny house to ‘McMansion’

Tiny houses challenge engineers and architects to demonstrate their craftsmanship with minimal living space and maximum storage for one or two people. They sharply contrast with another trend: the McMansion.

I’ve experienced both - in the same year. It began the day the bus driver told us, “get off here,” as he stopped in front of our grandparents’ house. While we went to school, our house had completely burned. My grandparents provided temporary housing in an adjacent, tiny four room (room, not bedroom) cottage.

Friends and neighbors donated beds and bedding. Mom set up wall to wall beds for seven with narrow aisles between beds in one modest bedroom with a sloping ceiling. In the living room we had a couch, a table too small to seat all of us, and floor stove that heated the tiny house. A compact range and sink in the kitchen along with a few shelves for food and dishes sufficed for preparing food in the kitchen.

Most tiny houses come with a bathroom barely big enough to change your mind let alone your clothes. We had a path to the outhouse or to the bath at the grandparent’s nearby house. With all of our possessions, including our recent Christmas and winter birthday gifts, in ashes, we did not have a lot of stuff to store in the tiny house. That was good because we did not have a lot of storage. The back room held a cord of wood for the wood burning stove that kept us warm.

There we stayed for a couple months while my parents worked out the financial details following the fire and began house shopping.

They bought a McMansion – a former boarding house, Victorian style, in a nearby village. My mom said, “I never did feel like I knew that house.” It was that large.

How large? Well the two-story house had porches on the front, back and both sides plus a balcony porch under the shade of the maple tree. Its full attic allowed tall people to stand comfortably. The basement had rooms for storing vegetables and cooling milk. Upstairs we had six or seven bedrooms - each with a closet about the size of a tiny house bedroom. My parents slept downstairs in the bedroom beside the parlor and the dining room. The house had both a winter and a summer kitchen. It also had a huge pantry that quickly became a modern bathroom replacing the path.

As a first grader, it looked huge to me. Our first winter in that drafty castle of a house all five kids slept in the only heated bedroom while the other rooms sat cold and empty. Christmas morning saw us in the rarely used parlor. After two years, my parents decided the boys needed to live on a farm and a “For Sale” sign appeared beside the sidewalk.

I did not want to move. In the wisdom of a third grader, I decided if there was no sign there would be no sale. I moved the sign inside the Victorian McMansion. The sign was out of sight but not out of mind. My parents looked and asked questions until my dad focused on me, “Where did you put the sign?”

I took him to the milk cooling room deep in the basement. Try and do that in a tiny house.

The old boarding house sold. We moved to an average four bedroom house with one kitchen. It lacked the intrigue of the McMansion or the engineering marvel of a tiny house, but it fit our family of seven perfectly.