The NotSoVeryCheap House

I have come to realize that when I think about potential new houses, I don't want so much a small house as a big house that's all on one level. I'm not saying it has to be large enough to require a Segway to navigate it...exactly. But I like big houses -- or at least some things about big houses.

Take Great Rooms. If you do an image search in Google using that term, you get a lot of images that aren't so much Great Rooms as Big Rooms Without Much Character. And some of them aren't all that big, either. But every so often, you find one that is very nice, like this one, which I found at www.dbklain.com:

I think that's a very classy room, and I would be delighted to live there. The only catch is, from the looks of things, I'd have to blow pretty much the entire budget on just that room. It'd be a very nice Great Room... and an outhouse. I don't think that'll fly.

Take kitchens. I like big kitchens, preferably with a decent eating area. No counters for me, thanks. The layout has to make sense -- I don't get the feeling that a lot of thought goes into that other than the classic 'kitchen triangle'. Unless it involves the cook, the scullery maid, and the serving wench, I don't want to hear about the kitchen triangle. I do want the kitchen to work well. Some basic thoughts -- the refrigerator should be placed such that someone using it, or just standing there mulling the selection (Close the door, you'll let all the cold out!!!) won't be in the traffic flow, and won't block access to cabinets or work areas. My sister in law's house has a refrigerator that's placed on the other side of the pathway through the kitchen. I don't like the kitchen, as its more a wide spot in the hallway than a separate room, but by god no one standing at the refrigerator is near any of the cabinets. At the same time, you can take something from the fridge, turn, and immediately put it down on an island. This is a good thing. One of the things we like most about the kitchen we have was done via an oversight by the builder -- he mis-measured for replacement cabinets, so we ended up with a tall thin base cabinet that's now used to store cookie sheets and similarly sized implements of baking. Works very well. On the other hand, he put the microwave over the kitchen stove, which is a classic placement -- and which is a killer if two people are cooking and both want to get at the work area at the same time. Not to mention the wheelchair access problem.

Hallways. I like hallways. They provide transition space, and a simple way to isolate the bedrooms from the rest of the house -- close the door, and the bleary eyed visitor doesn't find themselves in the living room while they're hunting for the bathroom. They let you put the quiet parts of the house off from the noisy ones. Plus, they're a natural gallery -- we have three or four favorite photographs in the hall, placed so that you see them each time you come out of our bedroom. I like that. But you have to watch it -- a relative noticed on a blueprint, just in passing, that the builder intended to have a stairway door open into a busy hallway. He pointed it out, asked that the door be rotated ninety degrees into a cul de sac in the kitchen, and saved a congestion point.

More later, maybe.