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House Tour
Feb. 7th, 2011 10:05 pmThis weekend I went on a tour of modern homes.
Normally I think these are kind of fun, but it didn't start well. First, I ended up going by myself. Second, instead of a booklet with a page on each home talking about all the cool things and showing how to get there, they just gave us a long page folded in half. The front and back covers were nothing but ads. Inside they did have all the addresses and a blurry map showing the location of each house as a dot several blocks wide. Not helpful. I guess we're all supposed to have GPS. And smart phones so we can look up all the cool information on the website. Third, they made us take our shoes off before entering even when the temperature was still in the low forties and they had (cold and durable) concrete floors.
I did have a map in the car, but I'm not all that comfortable driving my new standard transmission vehicle yet, so I quit after four houses. Then I went out to see just one more.
These days, I like to look for ideas to steal when I renovate my house. However, I was not at all impressed by the design at three of the houses. For example, I want there to be a place to hang a towel within reach of the shower. I don't like a lot of wasted space. Or hard-to-use space, like in that closet they built under the staircase where you open a normal door and the closet extends far to your left getting shorter and shorter. And they had walk-in closets that were only wide enough to hang clothes on one side instead of both. There was a glass landing on the top of a set of stairs over a first floor with high ceilings, so no one who's afraid of heights can ever join you upstairs. (Well, you could get a rug.)
However, I did like this kitchen:
It's a layout I call "party kitchen," meaning it approaches a square shape, and thus is able to hold a bunch of people in it. It has lots of countertop. And it has lots of cabinets. The dishwasher is right next to the sink, as it should be. It's open to the dining room (foreground) and living room (to the right), but you can't see dirty dishes from the living room.
I do think the top cabinets should go all the way to the ceiling so that top shelf can be protected from dust behind the door (and so you wouldn't need so much pea green paint). I'd rather have a proper vent hood than a small cabinet and microwave cubby that holds only certain sizes of microwaves. I think I'd rather scootch the refrigerator over to where the pantry is so so that you aren't stuck having to replace the refrigerator with one the same size next time or with having a big gap. You'd lose a pantry, but you'd get more countertop and cabinets--it seems like there would still be plenty of storage.
I also saw a nice big walk-in closet. Here's just one corner of it:
It's got lots of hanging rods for both long and short things plus lots of shelves and the top shelf lets you store things of any length, which is great. Those vertical walls mean you don't have to worry about the poles sagging, but the walls don't need to go all the way to the floor which wastes wood, makes it hard to vacuum, and would require complete replacement if there were ever any sort of flooding at all.
There's also a kind of shower I think I might like. What you do is you take a space the size of a bathtub and put the shower head at one end and a bench at the other end. Here's one:
You can see the bench on the left, but not the showerhead on the right. I like that tile. I like that there's natural light without it being that easy to watch you shower, though I'm not sure I'd want to try to clean that.
Here's another one (with a regular tub next to it):
You can see the bench at the back and the shower faucet on the side wall. Is all that glass easy to keep clean or are there hidden problems?
I used to like having that kind of bench in dressing room showers, though there was a curtain in between the shower and bench so your clothes would stay dry. But in your own house, you could probably have the bench outside the shower. So, I'm not totally sure what I think of these.
Here's one of the prettiest things I saw:
Pretty clocks! Just decorative, though; not a single one of them had the correct time. I understand that ten minutes after ten o'clock is a pretty time, but this is just another example of form over function. The scrabble letters in the glass jar are pretty, too, but I'm not sure when it would be useful. And three boards? Is there a Robo-Rally version of Scrabble I should know about?
Normally I think these are kind of fun, but it didn't start well. First, I ended up going by myself. Second, instead of a booklet with a page on each home talking about all the cool things and showing how to get there, they just gave us a long page folded in half. The front and back covers were nothing but ads. Inside they did have all the addresses and a blurry map showing the location of each house as a dot several blocks wide. Not helpful. I guess we're all supposed to have GPS. And smart phones so we can look up all the cool information on the website. Third, they made us take our shoes off before entering even when the temperature was still in the low forties and they had (cold and durable) concrete floors.
I did have a map in the car, but I'm not all that comfortable driving my new standard transmission vehicle yet, so I quit after four houses. Then I went out to see just one more.
These days, I like to look for ideas to steal when I renovate my house. However, I was not at all impressed by the design at three of the houses. For example, I want there to be a place to hang a towel within reach of the shower. I don't like a lot of wasted space. Or hard-to-use space, like in that closet they built under the staircase where you open a normal door and the closet extends far to your left getting shorter and shorter. And they had walk-in closets that were only wide enough to hang clothes on one side instead of both. There was a glass landing on the top of a set of stairs over a first floor with high ceilings, so no one who's afraid of heights can ever join you upstairs. (Well, you could get a rug.)
However, I did like this kitchen:
It's a layout I call "party kitchen," meaning it approaches a square shape, and thus is able to hold a bunch of people in it. It has lots of countertop. And it has lots of cabinets. The dishwasher is right next to the sink, as it should be. It's open to the dining room (foreground) and living room (to the right), but you can't see dirty dishes from the living room.
I do think the top cabinets should go all the way to the ceiling so that top shelf can be protected from dust behind the door (and so you wouldn't need so much pea green paint). I'd rather have a proper vent hood than a small cabinet and microwave cubby that holds only certain sizes of microwaves. I think I'd rather scootch the refrigerator over to where the pantry is so so that you aren't stuck having to replace the refrigerator with one the same size next time or with having a big gap. You'd lose a pantry, but you'd get more countertop and cabinets--it seems like there would still be plenty of storage.
I also saw a nice big walk-in closet. Here's just one corner of it:
It's got lots of hanging rods for both long and short things plus lots of shelves and the top shelf lets you store things of any length, which is great. Those vertical walls mean you don't have to worry about the poles sagging, but the walls don't need to go all the way to the floor which wastes wood, makes it hard to vacuum, and would require complete replacement if there were ever any sort of flooding at all.
There's also a kind of shower I think I might like. What you do is you take a space the size of a bathtub and put the shower head at one end and a bench at the other end. Here's one:
You can see the bench on the left, but not the showerhead on the right. I like that tile. I like that there's natural light without it being that easy to watch you shower, though I'm not sure I'd want to try to clean that.
Here's another one (with a regular tub next to it):
You can see the bench at the back and the shower faucet on the side wall. Is all that glass easy to keep clean or are there hidden problems?
I used to like having that kind of bench in dressing room showers, though there was a curtain in between the shower and bench so your clothes would stay dry. But in your own house, you could probably have the bench outside the shower. So, I'm not totally sure what I think of these.
Here's one of the prettiest things I saw:
Pretty clocks! Just decorative, though; not a single one of them had the correct time. I understand that ten minutes after ten o'clock is a pretty time, but this is just another example of form over function. The scrabble letters in the glass jar are pretty, too, but I'm not sure when it would be useful. And three boards? Is there a Robo-Rally version of Scrabble I should know about?