Three Kids? Space issues with small rowhouses

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No exactly what you’re asking but close enough that I’ll bite.

We’re in one of those big row houses that was converted into a two unit condo. So we have the bottom two floors. Our square footage is 2000, which is def bigger than most of the other row houses we looked at!

We have one small bedroom and a full bath on the main floor. Our daughter has that bedroom. Then the other floor has two huge bedrooms each with it’s own bathroom. We have one; our two sons share the other. It’s plenty of space for us.

Most of the other three bedroom row houses we looked at were 1300 sq ft. Generally they just had a half bath on the main floor, then three bedrooms upstairs, at least one of which was usually TINY, and then either just a shared hall bathroom, or sometimes also a master bath (so either 1.5 or 2.5 baths). They all felt much more like starter homes for people with two kids - once the baby outgrew the crib, you’d outgrow the house. Or a forever home for people with an only child (third bedroom making a much better office or playroom than bedroom).

This is nice to read about. We often look at those because they are bigger and cheaper. The thing that stops me a lot is noise between the two condos. We had complaints in our first (poorly built) condo when my son started walking and I never want to go through that again! Also worry a bit about the basement aspect but a lot of them have pretty good light.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No exactly what you’re asking but close enough that I’ll bite.

We’re in one of those big row houses that was converted into a two unit condo. So we have the bottom two floors. Our square footage is 2000, which is def bigger than most of the other row houses we looked at!

We have one small bedroom and a full bath on the main floor. Our daughter has that bedroom. Then the other floor has two huge bedrooms each with it’s own bathroom. We have one; our two sons share the other. It’s plenty of space for us.

Most of the other three bedroom row houses we looked at were 1300 sq ft. Generally they just had a half bath on the main floor, then three bedrooms upstairs, at least one of which was usually TINY, and then either just a shared hall bathroom, or sometimes also a master bath (so either 1.5 or 2.5 baths). They all felt much more like starter homes for people with two kids - once the baby outgrew the crib, you’d outgrow the house. Or a forever home for people with an only child (third bedroom making a much better office or playroom than bedroom).

This is nice to read about. We often look at those because they are bigger and cheaper. The thing that stops me a lot is noise between the two condos. We had complaints in our first (poorly built) condo when my son started walking and I never want to go through that again! Also worry a bit about the basement aspect but a lot of them have pretty good light.

PP here. We LOVE ours. We don’t have any major issues with noise. The nice thing, at least in ours, the “bedroom” floors are really far apart. You go up the front steps to the main door. Door to our place, staircase to the upstairs folks. Through our door, you walk into our main floor - living area, kitchen. Then from inside you go downstairs to the bedrooms. Upstairs, they walk into their main floor, and go up to their bedrooms. So there are two full floors between our bedroom and their bedroom. So even if it were noisy, it wouldn’t affect sleep (except potentially for my daughter, but we haven’t had any issues). It’s pretty sound proof. Every once and a while they’ll drop something and I’ll hear a thunk but that’s about it.

The light is big. We looked at others like this where the downstairs really felt like a basement and it was no good. Ours has super high ceilings, pretty big windows downstairs, and lots of built in lighting. It doesn’t feel basement-y at ALL.

[Anonymous]

I'm assuming these are 3 bedrooms houses. Obviously you have 2 kids in one bedroom, one kid in the other, and the adults in the last one.

[Anonymous]

Perhaps they have three bedrooms?

Or maybe they've creatively put three kids in one room, with a configuration like one of these: https://mumsgrapevine.com.au/2015/05/three-kids-in-one-bedroom/