What's your house worth?

It used to be a topic at dinner parties when people spoke of the radical acceleration to the value of their home.

People who were wise, or lucky enough, to buy a house about 20 years ago saw the potential cost of their abode to a buyer soar beyond their wildest dreams.

They were rich, they thought.

Well sort of, but only if they wanted to sell their house and not buy another because everything else had risen in price commensurately.

The bubble burst a few years ago when the banks (almost) went into meltdown and it seemed that the market wouldn’t move up again for a while.

But in the last week it has been revealed that, on average, house prices went up by an eye-watering 11.7% last year.

The biggest rise was 19.1% in London. Yes, a fifth of a property’s value in just one year.

Prices in many areas are now more than at the time of the very peak of the boom in late 2007.

So how do you get on the property ladder? Do you need a big place? What about a garden? Just how many sacrifices are you willing to make?

If you think you don’t need much room, maybe you should take a look at Jeff Wilson, a dean and an associate professor of biological sciences at Huston-Tillotson University.

The dean decided to see if he could live somewhere a little less roomy than the usual 2000 sq ft American abode and swapped his home for a dumpster.

The first issue to do this in the UK would be we don’t really have dumpsters. I mean you could try it in a wheeled bin but I don’t think you’d last very long - however at least your home could be hitched up and moved around on the wheels.

The dumpster Dr Wilson is living in is pretty much the same size as one you get at the tip at Emerald Street, in fact it’s 33 square feet.

I’m betting that the room you are in is probably bigger than 33 square feet.

From moving into an empty dumpster and being baked in the Texas sun, Dr Wilson’s place now has a lightbulb, a bed, a rug and even a few shelves.

In fact it’s even got air conditioning. Not bad for a bin.

The only downsize (if you pardon the pun) is that there’s very little storage space.

The good doctor got pangs of guilt when reading about himself speaking of his eight or nine bow ties and promptly cut his collection in half such was his horror at his own excess.

I should point out that when I say cut in half, I mean got rid of a few of them rather than slicing said neckwear into two distinct parts which would have rendered all nine useless.

He could have slung them into the bin, by which I mean his house.

Hmm, that must be a problem. If your house is a bin, what’s the bin? He probably sticks his arm out of the window (yes there is one) and drops his refuse into a 25,000 sq ft mansion thus completely confounding people.

Why is he doing this? In an interview with the Toronto Star he says he basically wants to show it’s OK to live a life with very little.

Returning to my original point about house prices, a des res in Islington is up for sale.

The house has only two rooms, a kitchen cum dining room cum lounge cum study cum again. There’s also a mezzanine bedroom (estate agent speak) that’s basically a big shelf above your lounge cum... oh you get the idea.

To get to the bedroom you have to start the climb up the stairs from the top of the kitchen units. No, I’m not joking. There’s also a toilet/wet room thing for your ablutions.

The price? A snip at £275,000.

Maybe they should start importing dumpsters to the UK?