Anytime I visit a hotel I have a little mental exercise that I can't help but run through. "Could I live here, long term?" I'm not talking about just big rooms or large, multi-room hotel suites, I wonder about the little slivers of hotel rooms you get when you're on the cheap.
A standard hotel room wouldn't be efficient living on it's own. Part of the problem being the premium you'd be charged, even if the hotel has a weekly or monthly rate. I've seen some single-room, kitchenless spaces that go for $1500 a week. Still, the space involved is good enough to live a simple life in.
The hotel I'm staying in as I write this is one room, but it's a fairly large one. There's a small refrigerator and a microwave. There's one closet, two queen beds, a desk, a chair and ottoman, and a dresser with a TV on it. A different configuration and a partition wall would make a fairly good space for two adults or even adults and kids.
I'm not sure when I started these exercises. I remember my brother and I making a cabin from a cardboard box that came from our console TV. I'm pretty sure the idea pre-existed that.
I also remember sitting in a bathroom and trying do decide if it was enough room if it was a space capsule. I decided it was, since you could sleep on the walls. There'd be no gravity, of course.
There was a time my great grandmother lived in a hotel, and I remember that. I also remember when she was staying in a very small camper. I think it was about ten feet long. Maybe twelve. Either way it wasn't a lot of space, and it was very hot, but I loved the idea then. I was only four or five years old. It seemed plenty big for me at the time.
The fascination with living in a small space was pushed aside when I started acquiring stuff. I moved away to college with everything I cared about in a 1980 Chevette. It all fit nicely in my dorm room, one that I shared with another guy I'd never met before.
At the end of the first term, I had to pack up. It was something we all had to deal with. Even when we were coming back for the next term, we had to clear our stuff out because intersession brought in other temporary tenants. But after four terms in the Dorm, I moved into a storage unit for a while as I was waiting for my new living arrangements to open up.
The house four of us occupied was tiny, but the space we each had was more than it had been. Our stuff ballooned. After two years I couldn't move everything all at once. It took several trips to move up the street.
Now it's fifteen years and five or six moves later. I've lost track. Now I can't even house everything in one place. The storage unit I use to hold the remains of my last retail business is due to be torn down in 60 days. I have to move it, at have to move the contents of the garage in that time. I also need to plan on moving out of the house my family lives in now as well.
All of this stuff and the thought of moving it brings me full circle. Could I live in this space? I could. Could I bring all my stuff? No way. And if I can exist here but my stuff can't, is that a bad thing? I don't know. Maybe it isn't.
We've joked about selling our house including all contents for a fixed price. Most of what's in there is usable, if not the sort of thing someone would buy new. Would someone pay an extra $10K for it over and above the cost of the house? Would we take it? I think so.
Would you sell everything in your house? Maybe less a box of keepsakes and a laptop. Would $10K be enough for you? Let me know what you think.
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