Improving Homes Through Idea Sharing
Planning For Expansion (and why we need professionals)
There are plenty of studies that explain how we humans make decisions, and the upshot seems to be that we really should not make them for ourselves. Whether choosing what to have for breakfast, who to marry and where to keep our kitchen trash--these are things we should perhaps let others decide. We are mired in our reasons, our competition with the Joneses, our need to control our destinies and a irrepressible urge to express our creativity (read: reinvent the wheel).
This applies to building houses as much as anything.
My artist friend and her musician husband built a house themselves in a county with no building codes. The original building had a 400 square foot footprint, so the couple and their 2-year-old daughter slept in a loft above the bathroom. They always intended to add on. First came the sunroom/dining area, which, due to its location, also became the mud room. Eventually they added three bedrooms and a pantry off of another side of the house, and finally a well-meant mudroom, which, unfortunately, was on the side of the house not reachable from the driveway.
The resulting house is charming. It has interesting roof lines and has room for a vibrant lively family, their art, instruments and cooking--it seems to serve their needs.
However.
When they added the dishwasher, the refrigerator had to move across the room, relegating the sofa to an awkward wall. Adding the wood-burning stove increased the conversational estrangement by taking its only logical place in the smack middle of the conversation area. The washing machine ended up in the living room and the kitchen trash can around the corner in the hallway. Then there's the leaking walls where the roof pitch angles weren't quite anticipated, the conundrum of what to do with the actual mud-room which was built in a third stage at the back of the house where people just won't enter, and the french drain which doesn't quite cut it in a deluge.
It's a lovely house. They did a thousand things right. But the spacing and drainage and kitchen usage issues were, in a way, unpredictable for a lay-person.
So now I am building a house and I know for sure I will plan for a washing machine, a dishwasher, a freezer and a trash can, even if we don't start out with those things. What I don't know is what other kinds of obvious mistakes we'll make. Will we forget to make room for towel racks? Will there be enough outlets? Will they be in strange places? Will we account for our drainage properly? Are the proportions going to be strange?
Enter the professional. . .
This applies to building houses as much as anything.
My artist friend and her musician husband built a house themselves in a county with no building codes. The original building had a 400 square foot footprint, so the couple and their 2-year-old daughter slept in a loft above the bathroom. They always intended to add on. First came the sunroom/dining area, which, due to its location, also became the mud room. Eventually they added three bedrooms and a pantry off of another side of the house, and finally a well-meant mudroom, which, unfortunately, was on the side of the house not reachable from the driveway.The resulting house is charming. It has interesting roof lines and has room for a vibrant lively family, their art, instruments and cooking--it seems to serve their needs.
However.
When they added the dishwasher, the refrigerator had to move across the room, relegating the sofa to an awkward wall. Adding the wood-burning stove increased the conversational estrangement by taking its only logical place in the smack middle of the conversation area. The washing machine ended up in the living room and the kitchen trash can around the corner in the hallway. Then there's the leaking walls where the roof pitch angles weren't quite anticipated, the conundrum of what to do with the actual mud-room which was built in a third stage at the back of the house where people just won't enter, and the french drain which doesn't quite cut it in a deluge.It's a lovely house. They did a thousand things right. But the spacing and drainage and kitchen usage issues were, in a way, unpredictable for a lay-person.
So now I am building a house and I know for sure I will plan for a washing machine, a dishwasher, a freezer and a trash can, even if we don't start out with those things. What I don't know is what other kinds of obvious mistakes we'll make. Will we forget to make room for towel racks? Will there be enough outlets? Will they be in strange places? Will we account for our drainage properly? Are the proportions going to be strange?
Enter the professional. . .
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