Be It Not Even Marginally Humble, There's No Place Like a New Home

New houses in America have more of everything (except residents). It’s counterintuitive, given the shrinkage in average household size, that the nation’s houses would get larger. But that’s just what they’ve done, as documented in the Census Bureau’s newly published Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2002. And even as new houses get bigger, people stuff more and more amenities into the country’s older housing stock.

Let us begin our house tour in the bathroom. If owners of new houses aren’t a well-scrubbed lot, it’s not for lack of a place to do the scrubbing.