Mansionize me!

Frank and I recently moved into an enormous house. Well, it's not enormous by most standards but before we were in a duplex and before that I lived in a 540 square foot apartment. So it feels really big. Plus, we have three toilets which means we're really livin' the dream.

In fact, I'm afraid our house may be contributing to an epidemic called "The Mansionization of America."

Here are some stats I got from our friends at CNN:

Back in 1950, according to the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), the average new house clocked in at 963 square feet. By 1970, that figure had swollen to 1,500 square feet.
Today's average: 2,400 square feet. One in five are more than 3,000 square feet.

Aw, man. We're below the average! We're not contributing to the problem one bit. Darn.

You may wonder, especially if you live in one of those neighborhoods with the word "estate" in it and the houses are actually as big as our duplex, why people would need such big houses.

I used to wonder that myself until I visited a house yesterday that is very guilty of contributing to the mansionization of America--by about 11,000 square feet. It's my friend Liz's parents house and I have to say, every square foot of that house, right down to the TWO laundry rooms, served a purpose.

When Liz took me on the tour I felt like we were on MTV's Cribs. Except it wasn't a minor celebrity's house and there weren't a bunch of mooching friends doing drugs by the pool.

Its most Crib-esque features included:
A media room--natch
Five bedrooms, each with its own bathroom (and I thought three toilets was the bomb!)
A cool screened-in porch that had insidey furniture + heaters like they have at restaurants
An exercise room--complete with a treadmill, elliptical, bike and one of those complicated lifting machines that has four sides and nobody ever uses.
A butler's pantry (love those but butler not included).
Back staircase (so necessary if you don't want to actually see "the help" face to face)
Best part: Master bath had two sides so there were his and her vanities, showers and toilets. My very own toilet! Now that's the dream!

Let's pause to do a toilet tally: two half-baths, five bedrooms plus remember there's two in the master = EIGHT toilets. That means you could use a different one every single day of the week. A Monday toilet, a Tuesday toilet, Wednesday toilet...

I'm trying to convince her parents to let Frank and me move in. We could live in the guest wing. We'd use the upstairs laundry room and we'd even take the back stairs with the other servants.

But until then we'll just have to settle for our below average square foot non-mansion--in a neighborhood with the name "Villas" in it. And just think, if we share with our neighbors on both sides, we too could have days of the week toilets. That's a whole different kind of dream.