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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2697 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 14, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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As a non American I am absolutely shocked at the size of the suburban houses everytime I visit. You can fit an entire goddamn apartment in basements. I always ask why don't they just clean up the place and rent it out and it's always a "eh, I guess I could do that, but eh, Im fine".

Anyways, I don't relate to your last part at all. I lived most of my life in a rather cramped apartment sharing a room with my brother. When I got my own room, it felt like I became royalty. Perhaps, you are just not cramped enough.. It absolutely makes a big fucking difference both ways. Losses always hurt more than equivalent gains because that's how human brains are, but the gains do feel good.

I always ask why don't they just clean up the place and rent it out and it's always a "eh, I guess I could do that, but eh, Im fine".

My wife and I have looked into finishing our basement. We don't have the skills to do a good job of it ourselves, so we would need to hire a contractor. We found out that it would cost us about $40,000 to hire a contractor to do that project. That's not an insurmountable amount of money, but it's not easy to come by either. So our basement remains untouched.

Basements are stupidly expensive to retrofit, and there are loads of hidden variables that can make the job even harder. Guys tend to quote 40-60k sight unseen.

For example, when you work on someone's basement you have no idea of the drainage situation, and that makes everything else precarious.

One of my friends has a finished basement that flooded twice. Not fun, not easy to fix, very frustrating for both the contractor and home owner who each can't tell if the other is retarded or trying to scam them.

I always ask why don't they just clean up the place and rent it out and it's always a "eh, I guess I could do that, but eh, Im fine".

Being a landlord in the US generally seems somewhat high risk and high responsibility. Better not to if you don't need the money.

Eh, renting rooms out of your house is very much a working class thing in the US- and renting those rooms is very much a poor person thing.

Letting poor people live with you comes with problems, so people prefer to avoid it. Landlording isn’t the issue; I can go on Craigslist and find people wanting to share an apartment with a random stranger right now if I want to, and that has even more headache. It’s not wanting to be around poor people.

Perhaps cramped was the wrong word, I absolutely do understand how different having one's own room is to not having one's own room. I was strictly talking about the square meters/feet as a metric here.

Area is a good enough proxy. I do think room layout is a very underrated metric, I've been in 1500 ft^2 homes that feel larger than 2000 ft^2 homes.

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