Frustrated with the size of your home?

You're not alone.But instead of feeling cramped, a growing number of Americans are finding they have more home than they want or need.The reasons are numerous. Baby boomers, 77 million strong, are looking to downsize in retirement. Young home buyers are finding it increasingly difficult to afford or maintain larger homes. Urban land is at a premium. Smaller homes in desirable neighborhoods are scarce or outlawed by covenant. And environmental concerns about a residence's "carbon footprint" have further dampened enthusiasm for spacious showpieces.

That doesn't necessarily mean that smaller times are ahead for everyone. For growing families, some investors, the wealthy or homeowners who just want the room, bigger will most likely continue to be better.But for homeowners who no longer wish to pay taxes, utilities and insurance on rooms they never use, or who simply find a smaller home more comfortable and aesthetically pleasing, the small-house movement is quietly reinventing the U.S. scale of living. My shed, my homeIn some cases, the small-house trend goes to the extreme Lilliputian end of the scale.Jay Shafer lives quite comfortably in a 100-square-foot house in Sebastopol, Calif.

You may have a tool shed or a master bath about the same size. Shafer's home is on the small end of a line of compact, ready-made dwellings he designs for his Tumbleweed Tiny House Co. His designs have won numerous awards for energy efficiency and green building. The homes cost between $20,000 and $48,000, excluding land.

Though many customers use them as vacation homes or mother-in-law cottages, there are those smaller-is-better devotees who, like Shafer, simply prefer to live within their means.Shafer, founder of the Small House Society, says "supersizing" came about when home builders hooked consumers on the one easily quantifiable aspect of every house: its square footage."It's true that the cheapest thing you can add onto a house is square footage, and of course the building industry likes to build these things and people are willing to pay a lot for that not-so-expensive addition," he says. "When the housing industry pushed for larger houses back in the '70s and '80s because their profits were leveling out, the banks followed suit.

Then the codes followed suit, so it became illegal to build smaller than a certain size."Americans quickly came to believe that more square footage paid for itself in resale, especially during the run-up of housing prices in the last decade. Since 1970, the average American home has grown from 1,500 square feet to the current average of 2,450 square feet, according to the National Association of Home Builders.Against that bigger-is-better investor mind-set, smaller homes were either shunned as fixtures from a bygone era or lumped in with mobile homes.

Shafer, Alchemy Architects, the Tiny House Co. and others are attempting to change such perceptions about compact living by extolling the virtues of small houses.Shafer says the small-house movement is growing as more people become dissatisfied with having to pay more for more house than they need."Most of the people who are interested tend to be looking at a house more as a home instead of an investment. It's hard to find a small house anymore. There is a demand for them and they're so rare," he says.

The Katrina effect New York designer Marianne Cusato wasn't out to change the world when she designed the Katrina Cottage. Her goal was to help provide immediate housing to the victims of Hurricane Katrina.But when Lowe's executives saw Cusato's compact, self-contained cottage at the International Builders Show in 2005, they recognized a solution to the broader need for affordable housing nationwide.Lowe's partnered with Cusato and made Katrina Cottages available to order at its 29 locations in Louisiana and Mississippi.

The one- and two-bedroom bungalows, in four styles ranging from 544 square feet to 936 square feet, are delivered in sections for easy assembly. The cost: $40 to $50 per square foot, or less than $50,000 for the largest floor plan