Home Truths

I'm going to make the most of the space I've got, writes Edel Morgan.

"Families of 12 were reared in these houses" is my husband's usual response when I curse our lack of space while skidding across the floor on a toy brick or after stubbing my toe on the base of the bouncy chair.

And he's right, families of 12 did live in modest three-bed houses and smaller, but they must have been families of 12 with very few possessions. My house was built in the late 1960s when large families were more common but for some reason the kitchen is smaller than you'd find in most modern one-bed apartments. "Nice and compact and suits the size of the house," is my husband's appraisal of the kitchen, forgetting the number of times he's had to bend over the cooker to let me get by to the sink.

This stoic attitude towards space, or the lack of it, must have been adopted by many large families in the past who, with little prospect of extending or moving elsewhere, just got on with it. Our expectation of the acceptable quota of space per person has changed. This is reflected in the city council's draft guidelines on Achieving Liveable Sustainable New Apartment Homes for Dublin City which, in an effort to convert families to apartment life, requires new two-bed apartments to be a minimum of 80sq m (861sq ft) and three-beds 100sq m (1,076sq ft), all with ample storage space.

With no scope to extend an apartment, this is only right and proper if the city's apartments are to remain relevant to a range of household sizes. But with the average Irish family much smaller now, why do many of us feel compelled to expand ever upwards and outwards? Could it be that we have too much stuff?

While my children have enough toys to turn our house into an obstacle course, they are positively deprived in comparison to the children of some friends, who have entire rooms devoted to every kind of train, plane and automobile (they mostly have boys) on the market and the entire Bob the Builder and Thomas the Tank Engine merchandise collection. The pressure is now on us to conform. My toddler has tried to leave these houses with toys under his arm and all hell breaks loose when they are prized off him at the door. Even worse, when these children come to our house, all we have is a pathetic toy corner with what one three-and-a-half year old visitor recently described as "stupid baby toys".

And it's not just toys that are the problem, the law of clutter is that it multiplies. You start off firing a few things into a spare room so the downstairs looks tidy and before you know it you have a whole room devoted to junk. Once it accumulates to a certain level, it gets harder to find the time or psychological strength to tackle it. Before long you are converting the attic to add a room to replace the one lost to junk. In the meantime you might be using your parents' home as a mini-storage depot, because you can't fit all your belongings into your own.

Rampant consumerism has left many people jaded. There seems to be an upsurge in interest in the froogle and freegan lifestyles and Dublin City Council's Dublin Waste website, where people trade unwanted items, is booming. Whereas before, people would steal from skips under cover of darkness, a recent council collection of household items saw my neighbours openly rummaging in each other's piles.

Another argument against extending is that in the current market it might make your house harder to sell. An estate agent recently told me that people who followed advice to "add value" have, in many cases, pushed their house out of the affordability range of many buyers.

So with all this in mind, I'm going to really try to make the very most of the space I've got. Which is probably just as well because we can't afford to extend or move anyway. From now on, it's going to be quiet acceptance and clever storage solutions all the way.