I sooooo hope that small houses catch on as "hot" in lots of places besides the big cities. I want to retire (at a fairly young age!) and travel but need to sell my small 1100 sqft house in the Sacramento Area.
I love AT for the great ideas to fix it up and make it appealing for market. Thanks for the great ideas.

Thanks Leslie! I played "follow the links" and ended up here:
http://www.kephartliving.com/Browse.aspx

I do like modular homes. I do like Universal Design. I do like SMALL homes. And I had NOT seen that Kephart site before.

They have BIG bathrooms (accessible) and a washer and dryer.

There's one called "Party Central" that reminds me a bit of a weeHouse, with a REAL (not wee, maybe "weel") bathroom.

There's one called "Glass House" that has those cool glass doors that slide open to make the indoors and the outdoors merge.

My favorite was "Pool House". It has many really neat features. Like the dining area, that has a roof...and two of the walls are roll-up glass garage doors.

I love looking at home plans. And I saw a new one over at Tumbleweed that I hadn't seen before.

I have lots of new dream homes now to think about.

I was very disappointed in the "Place House" site. The only one there that is "small" is the garage that can be set up with a kitchen and bath:
http://placehouses.com/Accessory.html

Their idea of "tiny" is this 1370 sq ft giant:
http://placehouses.com/Tiny.htm

The only one with the potential of Universal Design is the garage/studio.

The one good thing they have going, is the choice of interior packages/colors. That makes sense.

Overall, the site gets a "D". Prices too high, homes too large, and not at all set up for lifetime living.

We bought a large house two years ago -- 2500 sq ft, with a detached 3-bay garage -- and I wish nearly every day we'd gone small. But my S/O wasn't willing to take the leap -- he still believes bigger is better. If anything ever happens to this one, I'm building a Katrina cottage.

It was only when I moved to SF that I discovered there were such things as 1bd houses & 4 or 5 room homes between 600-895 sqft! I could slap myself for frowning upon such places when I could actually afford one, but they just seemed abnormal compared to the huge homes back in Pittsburg.

Being a renter has taught me I'm all about the lowered costs and lesser amount of elbow grease needed to maintain smaller spaces.

If people would only stop renovating these cute little cottages into monstrosities (like they are doing in Northern Virginia and I imagine elsewhere)!
This is how my grandparents lived (and they had kids!) so I hope I'll eventually be able to find a small house I can afford. Who has time to clean a 2000 sq ft house? Who can afford to cool and heat all that unused space?

Madampince - I'm with you on the Katrina Cottage! They're perfect!

http://katrinacottagehousing.org/

ValHalla, I remember when NoVa was a nest of smaller homes -- now it's like you said, monstrosities! I live on the other side of the state, but have made many trips to NoVa and WDC over my 46 years of life.

Heather, the Katrina cottages are just perfect. If for some reason we got hit by the tornadoes that seem to flock to our area, I'd get KCC 544 as our replacement. My better half has conceded that bigger is not necessarily better for us, although we've loved rescuing and renovating an older home.