Home Improvement

5 Big Benefits of Living in a Small House

Think a bigger home is better? Believe it or not, there’s a lot to love about less square footage. Check out these 5 BIG benefits of living in a small house!

Are there actually benefits to living in a small house?

I’ve moved 11 times as an adult.

I’ve lived in 300 square foot basement apartments, 900 square foot town homes, 3,000 square foot large homes and pretty much everything in between. In all those moves, one thing has been constant.

The large homes may be impressive to look at, but the benefits of living in a small house make it my favorite to live in.

Here are Big 5 Benefits of Living in a Small House

If you feel stuck in your small house, I want you to think about the benefits that the smaller house brings to your family. There are so many benefits to small house living that are hard to appreciate until you’ve moved out. These are my top 5 benefits of living in a small house.

A smaller house saves you money

Because a smaller home typically costs less, this frees up money every month to spend on things that you really want. It’s not just the lower mortgage payment that will save you money, though. There’s about a $200/month difference for our electric bill from our 900 square foot home to our 3000 square foot home. That adds up to major savings over the years that you’ll spend in your home.

Just as important as having extra money to spend every month, is knowing that you’re living below your means. Living below your means gives you peace of mind if you have a major financial setback like being unable to work, losing a job, or having a serious medical problem.

A smaller house is easy to clean

Cleaning 900 square feet is obviously less work than 3000 square feet. Let me tell you, “cleaning the house” in my 300 square foot basement apartment took about 7 minutes. Cleaning the house in my 900 square foot townhouse took about 2 hours. Cleaning the house in my 3000 square foot home took about 5 hours. The benefits of living in a small house = less cleaning!

When you’re cleaning your house every week, that’s a pretty significant time-saving. Have you ever carried a large vacuum up and down 3 flights of stairs? It’s not fun. Your only other choice is to buy a vacuum for every level of your house… or never vacuum.

A large house encourages you to have more “stuff” in it, which is more “stuff” that needs to be cleaned and cared for. We filled the 3000 square foot home to the brim with stuff we thought we needed. When we lived in the smaller houses, we thought about where we would put things before we bought them and walked away from a purchase if we didn’t know.

A smaller house can help build relationships.

There are plenty of families that grew up in mansions that are extremely close, but I truly believe that my upbringing in a small house (1000 square feet) brought my family closer together. When you live in a small space together, you learn to work around each other and diffuse problems before they happen.

We jokingly say “There’s nowhere to run to” in our house and it’s a true statement. It’s really hard to avoid people in a small home. You learn to work around your differences and mediate problems as they come up.

In the 3,000 square foot house, it was common for my husband to play Xbox downstairs and me to watch movies or fold laundry upstairs. In the small house… Everyone spends time in the living room because that’s the only option. It makes us closer to each other since we spend more time together. We choose activities that would involve everyone like game nights and popcorn parties instead of individual activities (like Fallout and Reality TV).

A smaller house encourages you to live more simply

Believe it or not, one of the biggest benefits of living in a small house is you have less space, so you’ll choose wisely what deserves a spot in it. I promise you that you don’t really need everything we buy to fill up that 3000 square foot home. And you’ll likely be happier without it. Think about the things that you use every single day. Now add in a few hobbies that you do frequently. Those are the things you need to have space for in your home.

Our great-great-grandmothers had a pot and a pan. We have 13 different types of pots, pans, steamers, fryers, griddles, slow cookers, rice cookers, woks, fondue pots, you name it. And yet, they made every single meal from scratch while I still struggle with avoiding the drive-thru. I find more and more that the fewer things I have, the happier I am.

A smaller house is easier to customize

When you live in a 3,000 square foot home with vaulted ceilings, two living rooms, and four bedrooms it can be really expensive to furnish. It can be even more expensive to decorate! Without a large amount of expendable income, it’s hard to create the warm and inviting home you dream of.

When you live in a smaller house though, having your space set up and decorated exactly how you want it is pretty easy! You can paint yourself, and start small grabbing quality items that are made to last and upgrading things slowly over time. After some time, you’ll have a magazine-worthy house that you’ll be proud of at the fraction of the cost of a larger home.

My 700 square foot apartment was gorgeous and I was so proud to have friends over for dinner. My 900 square foot townhouse was beautifully decorated and personalized. It felt like a home as soon as you walked in. My 3,000 square foot house felt really impersonal. There were a lot of white walls and it had a “bare-bones” feel to it. It felt like a large house, and not a cozy home.

While I certainly think that having a large cozy home is possible, I want you to realize that there are so many blessings in your small home that you might overlook while you’re wishing that you had a larger home. Because I’m over here, wishing that I had your smaller home.

To recap, here are the 5 big benefits to living in a small house!

  1. A smaller house saves you money
  2. A smaller house is easy to clean
  3. A smaller house can help build relationships.
  4. A smaller house encourages you to live more simply
  5. A smaller house is easier to customize

Enjoy the Benefits of Living in a Small House

At the end of the day, it’s not the size of your house, but what you fill it with. You can be happy in an apartment or you can be happy in a mansion. The house won’t create your happiness, it supports it.

Do you agree? Let us know in the comments below!

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Rosemarie Groner

Rosemarie Groner is a formerly stressed, overworked and exhausted mom who loves blogging almost as much as she loves brownies. She writes at The Busy Budgeter about how she used the free Ultimate Money Saving Workbook to reduce their spending enough to be able to quit her job, stay home with her kids and then found way to make up her salary at home. She’s still working on the cure for exhaustion.

View Comments

  • A smaller house also got us to be more creative with furniture. We've done a lot of DIY's to save a little and get more space to put our stuff!

  • I like that you mentioned that living simply can come with living in a small house. My dream is to one day be able to buy a single family home where I can stay for most of my adult life. Maybe I can even have that as an option if I ever settle down one of these days.

  • I love the idea of having a small house, it's great that you mentioned great benefits here. It's really nice to own a home property. When you're planning to buy a land or house property, be sure to know and get all the necessary papers to avoid land taking issues in thr future.

  • Love this! I've been living in house-shares for ages and as a result, have got used to fairly "cosy" living, but I'm aiming to buy my own place at the end of next year and am trying to resist the urge to go for something much bigger than I actually need! Living in houseshares with basically only a room to properly call your own has meant that I have managed to avoid accumulating too much tat, so hopefully that'll stay the same with my own place!

  • Yes! There are 3 of us, and we have a little less than 1300 sq ft. We see no reason to upgrade now only to downsize later when our son is grown. We love our small, cozy home!

  • I live in a small studio in Switzerland.
    A good rental including costs for
    electeicity, water and heating. There
    are two communal washing rooms
    in the basement for laundry. They
    are clean and things always function.
    In Switzerland rents can never be
    increased. Only if a total renovarion
    needs to be done, or the owner needs
    the house / apatment for a family
    member. In which case, it legally
    has to be proved and the tenant being
    given about a years norice to vacate.
    All very fair.

  • I love this! We bought our 1308 sq ft “starter home” in 2007, and here we are still here in 2020 and 2 kids later! This article makes so many great points that are exactly why we stay put. We love our neighborhood and decided we won’t fall into the pressure of keeping up with the Jones’s if you will! I am so glad we aren’t the only ones!

  • I confess, I prefer living in a small house, and it's not just for the reduced electric bill. My kids grew up spending more time outside, where they could run & roam, rather than indoors. (Yes, less-cleaning is definitely a plus as well ;)

  • All of the comments are so interesting. It all really depends on the families living in the homes. Our first home with two small children was 1200 square feet. It was a capecod style home built in 1949. The front door opened directly into the living room and you could just walk a circle through the kitchen hallway bedroom hall bedroom and back into the living room. We had the stairs at the back of the house that lead to two bedrooms upstairs. We had an acre of land. I still love that house. But, the neighborhood was going bad to say the least. Anyway, we moved to a new raised ranch. Everything is on the same level with a downstairs with a family room and a bedroom and garage. But, upstairs is 1290 square feet in a rectangle shape and well it wasn't until just recently when I realized it feels like an apartment. Very strange really because when the children were growing up I never thought that. I think having the den downstairs helped plus they played outside a lot. We have hosted family dinners with our large family. It never felt small or crowded even though I guess it was a little. We do have a deck, a patio. Maybe that helped give everyone plenty of room so no one felt crowded. But, now it feels too small with just my husband and I and I don't like the apartment feel of it. I like separate rooms and living spaces. It really all comes down to the floor plan. The house can be small but as long as there is a downstairs, upstairs where people can have a private place, it is all relative. Maybe I spend too much time with my husband. Haha.

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Rosemarie Groner

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