Dwelling spaces.
May. 19th, 2010 09:15 pmOne of the things I miss deeply about my old house is the interior design. I don't mean the paint colors or the tile designs but how the house is put together, both in terms of layout and the house itself - the stuff that's still there when you take out all the movable objects, from seashells to pianos. Stuff like fireplaces and foyers. The house I'm in now was built in the early 1900s and remodeled fairly recently, but the design is still the same, with very few changes overall. The house I grew up in was built in the late 1950s and my parents remodeled quite a bit. Some of the differences are as simple as the environments - in the Sacramento Valley there's no need for radiators - and some of them are from the eras they were built. This house has a servant's stairway from the kitchen, and my old house has a dining area attached to the kitchen.
At first I thought it was kind of weird that my old house was built nearly fifty years before the Not So Big House movement kicked off, since it follows so many of the basic principles, like having human-sized living rooms instead of Pittsburgh's caverns and a lot more shelving and storage space. As it turns out and as I learned last week when my parents were giving a short tour, a lot of the storage in the house was put in before I was born. Bookcases built into the walls of the front room plus a windowseat with its own caches under the cushions, walls of closets and drawers, things I didn't need to think about until I got to Pennsylvania because they're not here.
Some of it's got to be the way the houses are lived in: this house and the previous one where I rented a room weren't single-family dwellings intended to occupy its residents for decades to come, but rather places for students and budget yuppies to sleep, eat, study, shower, and maybe watch some TV. I don't know how much of it is still the ingrained idea that houses shouldn't have stairs in them. But a lot of it's looking around and not seeing things built into the house, or looking around and not seeing something built to a human scale. As I've probably griped about before and will complain about many more times, the kitchen has almost no counter space and about a third of it's taken up by a microwave, and the cabinets are way too far out of reach to make the top ones worthwhile - they go up to the ceiling, but the ceiling's farther away than it should be. And the closets here are tiny, seriously minuscule, to the point where my dad and I joke you can put piece of paper and a pen inside one and have them be crowded, and you can also fit in a paperclip if you hang it from the door.
I've had plenty of renting, condos are right out, and I don't like the idea of an apartment. I've said I've wanted to buy a house for a long time, and these past two years make me want it even more. Not necessarily for the ability to walk around certain in the knowledge I own the space, or the ability to buy the appliances I want to use, or the freedom to put in a garden. Mostly to do what my parents did, and make it into a space that's open and welcoming.
At first I thought it was kind of weird that my old house was built nearly fifty years before the Not So Big House movement kicked off, since it follows so many of the basic principles, like having human-sized living rooms instead of Pittsburgh's caverns and a lot more shelving and storage space. As it turns out and as I learned last week when my parents were giving a short tour, a lot of the storage in the house was put in before I was born. Bookcases built into the walls of the front room plus a windowseat with its own caches under the cushions, walls of closets and drawers, things I didn't need to think about until I got to Pennsylvania because they're not here.
Some of it's got to be the way the houses are lived in: this house and the previous one where I rented a room weren't single-family dwellings intended to occupy its residents for decades to come, but rather places for students and budget yuppies to sleep, eat, study, shower, and maybe watch some TV. I don't know how much of it is still the ingrained idea that houses shouldn't have stairs in them. But a lot of it's looking around and not seeing things built into the house, or looking around and not seeing something built to a human scale. As I've probably griped about before and will complain about many more times, the kitchen has almost no counter space and about a third of it's taken up by a microwave, and the cabinets are way too far out of reach to make the top ones worthwhile - they go up to the ceiling, but the ceiling's farther away than it should be. And the closets here are tiny, seriously minuscule, to the point where my dad and I joke you can put piece of paper and a pen inside one and have them be crowded, and you can also fit in a paperclip if you hang it from the door.
I've had plenty of renting, condos are right out, and I don't like the idea of an apartment. I've said I've wanted to buy a house for a long time, and these past two years make me want it even more. Not necessarily for the ability to walk around certain in the knowledge I own the space, or the ability to buy the appliances I want to use, or the freedom to put in a garden. Mostly to do what my parents did, and make it into a space that's open and welcoming.
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