Greenspan Has His Head Up His Housing Bubble

Well, all the headlines said Alan Greenspan said that there was a housing bubble, and it was going to pop. I read his remarks, and the fact he said no such thing means little, I guess. The front page of newspapers is the editorial page now, masquerading as news, and the editorial pages are the equivalent of a disturbed person standing on the streetcorner handing out mimeographed screeds, while wearing a sandwich board that say: “The World Will End Yesterday.”

And what does Alan Greenspan know about housing prices, anyway?

Everyone wants to report on the housing bubble, because they are mired in tired old thinking about all investments, housing included. They believe Wall Street is a big casino, not a place that uses the sale of securities to determine the value of publicly held companies. And they believe that if housing prices go up, they’ll have to go down. “Because you know, they have to, and stuff, because, like, they went up, and I don’t know why, so like, they’ll have to go down, and we’ll keep saying so until they do even if it takes ten years, and then we’ll say we told you so.”

I’d like to ask every one of the authors of this kind of drivel, after they blurt out “It’s a bubble!” to tell me what a bubble is. I doubt they could.

Let’s go to the dictionary, shall we?

a : something that lacks firmness, solidity, or reality b : a delusive scheme

According to CLNN, 300 million people joined Amway last year, and decided to sell each other houses until we all have enough money to, well, I don’t know what, buy a house?

So as you observe the desolate landscape laid out for you by CLNN, (the Chicken Little News Networks,) I advise you to keep a few things in mind:

1. Alan Greenspan doesn’t set mortgage rates.

You heard it here first, folks. Alan Greenspan’s job is to make sure there’s not too little, or too much money in the banks. That’s it. He’s done a fair job of it, for the most part, but he’s a bit of an old thinker. He waited way to long to cut interest rates six years ago or so, still fearing nonexistent inflation around every corner, while deflation was much more likely.

Al likes to say obscure things about inflation, and people at the newspapers who don’t know the difference between inflation and indigestion wax wroth about how dire it all is. Gas is $2.50 a gallon, Crazy Al jacks up the short term interest rate every time Andrea Mitchell brushes her teeth, but inflation never appears. Passing laws against imports could trigger it, but Smoot Hawley redux can’t get any traction in Congress.

Inflation is when productivity gains can’t keep up with rising wages, regulation, and ambulance chasing lawyers. Look up France and Germany for that kind of problem, we don’t have it- except the lawyers; we’ve got those in spades. But in France and Germany they’re running the country instead of leeching off it. Big difference.

The more Al jacks up short term interest rates, the less likely that the term of your average mortgage is going to see runaway inflation. So he jacks it up short term, and the 15 and 30 year rates go still lower. Smarter people than me, and Old Al maybe, are betting their money on long term stability.

2. Beware the Blanket Statement: “Houses are overvalued.”

What houses? Where?

This one amuses me. All houses everywhere? Says who? Based on what? Your house is worth what another is willing to pay for it. If you ask me, a house in San Francisco is worth about ten percent of what they’re getting for it. But you’re not asking me. You’re certainly not asking some community college grad working at the newspaper to put a value on it. Mr. Greenspan’s too busy to do your home inspection and appraisal, I presume. So you put a sign out front that says: For Sale. If someone gives you the money, that’s what it’s worth.

There was a joke that circulated around Japan twenty years ago. You remember, back when Japan was taking over the world, at least according to the knuckleheads now saying we’re all going to be living in our cars while Alan Greenspan and the banks decide what to do with our repossessed bubble houses. We were all just gonna be slaves, buying VCRs with borrowed money, and Japan would own the USA lock stock and barrel. For you youngsters, I didn’t just mistype “China.” It was Japan back then, the unstoppable economic force that was gong to wipe us off the money map.

Anyway, the joke went something like this:

Two men are on the subway. One says to the other: “I have a million dollar dog.” His friend says:

How do you know it’s worth a million dollars?

He replies:

“Because I traded my two $500,000 cats for it.”

That was a bubble. A real one. The Japanese were swimming in money, and being unable to buy decent real estate or any other worthwhile thing, it chased its tail around the island, looking for somewhere to land.

They saved it like crazy, and the smart ones invested it in the USA, and made even more money they couldn’t buy anything worth owning with. And Japan’s been in a recession for about fifteen years. But at least they don’t have “a trade deficit” Bubble people are crazy about trade deficits too. They’re really big numbers they don’t understand, so they make them nervous. I don’t have time to make fun of that today.

3. Beware People Who Say: All Home debt is bad.

Let me get this straight. If you borrow against a tax deductible appreciating asset, while you get 100% of the use of it, you’re a fool. I see. Since you’re certain, for reasons unknown and inexplicable, that housing prices are going to tumble, I’ll be a lot better off if the money I’m losing is all mine, as the equity in my home plummets.

Let’s say I buy a house for $250,000.00. I pay cash. You buy the one next door, and pay the same, but mortgage the whole thing. We both make the same amount of money. Houses go in the toilet, because, well, they just do, the bubble people said so. Both homes go down to $200,000.00. That’s a twenty percent loss, and just what the doomsayers are expecting, and I suspect, secretly hoping for. Who’s screwed?

Well, we both still have houses to live in. The bank doesn’t throw you out because you lost equity. You just have to make the payments every month. I paid cash, so I’m out $50,000.00 if I sell. You sell your house, and you’re out the same $50k to get out of the mortgage. But you had your money the whole time. That money returns about 11% a year, on average, if invested in the stock market long term. And you got to keep more of what you earned, because the tax deduction for home mortgage interest is one of the few really big deductions you get. I don’t write these tax laws, by the way, I just read them. The bank owned your house, but you lived in it. And you got the use of your money for yourself, and used the bank’s money for a place to live. And when your house appreciates, you keep it all, even if you have five cents equity in it to start.

I keep picturing people burying money in coffee cans in their yard, or moving to a bunker compound in Montana, when I hear investment advice like this. Owning things free and clear is nice. My house is the last thing I’d pay off.

4. Beware misinformation: “People are remortgaging their houses to go on cocaine and gambling binges.”

No they’re not. 99% of them are refinancing their homes to lower their interest rates. That makes it easier to repay whatever they owe on their houses, whether it’s 10% or every last dime. I’m in the housing business, and know lots more people who are too. Trust me, people are plowing the money they cash out on refinance mainly on two things: They add on to or improve their existing home, or buy additional property, like vacation homes. The additions make the homes still more valuable and useful, and add equity again. Many more are using their equity money to start businesses, (I did) and add home offices to their houses.

Greenspan’s comments, where they weren’t totally opaque, basically said it’s unwise to take equity out of your house and spend it on beer and cigarettes. That’s why he gets paid the big bucks, for insights like that. I doubt Mr.Greenspan would advise you to spend your rent money, children’s college fund, welfare check or your toll change on those items either, but that wouldn’t make a headline for the Bubble people.

5. Some people are going to get killed in the housing market.

They always do. And some lenders will take it on the chin. But how does that have anything to do with rising home values? People are investing exorbitant amounts in their homes in places where their homes can become almost worthless, but that’s not a housing bubble. Spendthrift and/or corrupt public administrations, who overregulate business and building but take a laissez faire attitude towards criminals, all the while jacking up taxes inexorably, are far more likely to make people overpaying for property regret it eventually. But that’s politics, not banking.

6. Will somebody please read the tax code?

It’s complicated, I know, and so much easier just to slap Greenspan’s picture on over: “Housing Holocaust Imminent”

They changed the tax code to allow you to keep 100% of the capital gains you realize when your house appreciates and you sell it. It’s the only investment available to the average Joe that does that. Even 401k and suchlike only postpone tax liability, but Real Estate capital gains tax has been voided if you stay in the property for two years. Lots of people buy dumps, renovate them and sell them. Selling your home and getting the equity money tax free is a powerful inducement for home turnover. Lots of people are doing this, and in general the whole market is more wide open to churn, with people buying and selling more often because the IRS isn’t looming over their shoulder like Kong.

Let’s recall the old formulation was you HAD to IMMEDIATELY spend your realized equity on a more expensive house than the one you just sold, or suffer crushing capital gains taxes. That was a much more potent formula for overspending and overvaluing housing than the current tax landscape. The landscape of Real Estate, taxation, and employment has changed dramatically, but the fuddy duddies are mired in the past, and think: Meltdown!

7. What about the cost of land?

This never gets any attention. People shrieking that housing will become worthless overnight never analyze what drives housing prices. Ever try to get a building permit? People who write for the newspapers about real estate bubbles must all go home to their rent controlled apartments after their all night foam party raves and think, any time you want, you can build a house.

It isn’t the same everywhere, but for the most part, a building lot is extremely difficult to get your hands on these days. And if you do manage to get one, it will have myriad of restrictions on what you can build on it. Towns like the one I live in, tax Real Estate sales and use the money to buy land and leave it fallow, because they like mosquitoes and skunks. Oops, I mean “Open Space.” What do you suspect that does to the cost of real estate? Do you think the lawyers and engineers you have to hire to run the gamut of committees and officials will work for food?

The cost of a building lot in the town I live in currently is difficult to express as ratio, because there aren’t any lots. Infinity for a price, or zero as a divisor mucks up your bubble ratios. All the bubble popping in the world isn’t going to repeal one of those zoning, environmental, or building code restrictions. And I doubt we’re about to start building dikes to get more real estate like the Dutch did. They blew it all on tulip bulbs anyway. Now there’s a bubble.

8. Be skeptical of people who say: The banks are in a drunken stupor, and are loaning money to felons and imbeciles by the truckload, or are hoping to repossess the properties when they default.

I’m an American, and as such, I’m willing to listen to anything that disparages bankers or politicians, of course, but this one doesn’t hold much water either. The last thing a bank wants is repossessed property.

Listen to NPR. They, among others, have their knickers in a twist because bankers aren’t adhering to “conforming loan” standards. “Conforming loan” refers to strict guidelines set by a bizarre government /private lending business called Fannie-Mae. Now, when I say strict, I really mean bizarre and difficult to comply with. I don’t mean to say they have any correlation to the ability or willingness of a borrower to repay his debt. It’s just that bureaucrats like a pile of paper with heft, and the paperwork they make you fill out to “conform” has that nice heavy feel they like, in that manila folder with the accordion bottom they adore, and they lift it up and say: “That’s about five pounds, here’s your half a mil”

So NPR interviews a guy that gives “no-doc” loans. No doc loans, and their many related cousins, determine your credit worthiness by reviewing your credit history, appraising the property you want to buy, and lending you the portion of the property price they feel comfortable letting out of the bank, in the unlikely event they have to recover the asset and sell it. They charge a premium rate to cover the increased risk of less documentation.

That sounds a whole lot more like sensible business, banking, and risk management practice than the bubble people and their conforming loans.

Let me give you a concrete example of which I have first hand knowledge:

I was an employer twelve years ago. I wanted to buy a house, or buy land and develop it. My brother worked for me, and wanted to buy a house for his family. We applied, by coincidence, at the same bank for “conforming” loans.

The phone rings in my office. Bank lady says, sorry Greg, but we can only lend you $89,000.00 to purchase a five acre lot and build a three bedroom house on it. You’re not incorporated, so you’re considered self employed, and you’re too much of a risk to lend more than that to, even though your credit is spotless. It doesn’t matter that the property will be worth double or triple that amount the minute you’re finished with it, and you’re a licensed builder unlikely to build something unsaleable. Click.

Phone rings again, ten minutes later. EXACT SAME BANK LADY asks: Does your brother work for you? Yes. What are his prospects for future employment with you? Pretty good, mom will be mad if I fire him. I ask the nice lady: Don’t you feel a wee bit silly telling me that owning a business makes me a risky loan prospect, but all my employees have to do is flash two paychecks from me and they’re good to go? Yes, but rules are rules. Click.

I call my brother. How much are you borrowing?

$250,000.00

There’s your conforming loan, bubble dudes.

To Be a Father

The Big One’s ten years old this week. He’s a wonder. He’s always talked like a diplomat. When he was four years old, he met a friend of mine.

“Hi, my name is William Fischer, but you can call me Bill. “

“My name is Miles Gregory Sullivan, and you can call me…Miles Gregory Sullivan.”

We still laugh about that one. Bill called him “Miles Henry Kissinger” from that day forward.
It’s not that simple any more. He’s sophisticated, and has opinions now, as you can imagine, and you can’t always tell what he’s thinking.

And you wonder sometimes if you’re a good father to him.

As he was our first child, we had to figure out how to be parents, on the run. When he sneezed in his crib, you’d stand over him, and tried to draw each labored breath out of him with your willpower alone, and prayed and listened intently for the next. It’s easier with the second child. You know he won’t die. He’ll just give you a cold that makes you run on two cylinders for the five weeks it takes to recover, just in time to give you another.

Miles was always sick. Not real sick, thank goodness, just one ear infection after another. If you’ve had the big pink bottle of medicine in your refrigerator all winter, you know what I’m talking about. He went to daycare, and back before politically correct calculations became an ironclad part of healthcare, the doctor was frank enough to tell us: He’ll be sick all the time, the daycare is a germ swapping laboratory.

Another doctor advised Eustachian tubes. They insert little drains in the tot’s ears to drain the fluid that builds up in there, the theory being that infection can’t breed there if there’s no water to do it in. The doctor warned us about the possibility of deafness if he continued to get infections, while Miles yanked on his stethoscope and made faces, and we decided to try it.

As I understand it, they’ve recently decided to stop advising this treatment. It worked for our boy, as near as we can tell- the frequency of infections plummeted after the procedure, and I recall my wife showing me the little blue tube on his pillow when it fell out some years later.
The procedure required me to be a real husband and father for the first time, and I remember it vividly. We went to a different hospital, better than the awful abattoir we were subjected to when he was born. So far so good. They specialized in doing the procedure. Everybody was very professional and as kind as you could expect from people who were busy.

They explained that our son would have to be anaesthetized, and it would be better if one of his parents was with him, because it would frighten him if he felt alone. My wife was too nervous to do it, and it fell to me. I was put in a cap, gown, and mask, and led into the theater.

My boy was upset, as you can imagine, and clung to me like a little monkey. The doctors and nurses explained that I would have to hold him still while they gave him the gas.

He fought like a tiger.

Parents know their children. My mind drifted back to the many times I carried him up the stairs, already dreaming on my shoulder, unable to keep his eyes open until I placed him in his crib. His legs and arms would gently sway as I mounted the stairs, and his hot breath whispered on my neck, and occasionally he would draw out a long sigh, and his big heavy head would sink a little deeper into my shoulder. After he went in his crib, I often stood over him and watched him sleep. His eyes would flutter under his lids, and he’d murmur and clench his fists, and then drift off again into the deep, untroubled sleep of the innocent and unafflicted. The clock would tick, and the house would emit the endless little sounds, the rhythm of the seasons working their way through the boards; and I would wait, and watch, and when he was safe and warm and content, we were both content.

As I said, parents know their children. And I knew this time, my little boy was terrified. Strangers in masks were holding a mask over his face, and he couldn’t breathe, and the light shone in his eyes like ten suns, and everything was hard and cold and strange.
And his father held him, so the strangers could kill him.

What else could he have thought? He looked up at me, just before the gas finished its work, his limbs flailing, and me using all my weight and strength to try to hold him still, and he looked into my face, and I knew those eyes- my eyes, his grandfather’s eyes- they looked at me and accused me: Father, they’re killing me. How could you help them?

It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, and remains so to this day. I spent the next forty-five minutes beside myself with doubt and uncertainty, as anyone understands who knows what it means to have your child asleep without the surety he would wake up. And the possibility was remote, of course, that it could go wrong, and he could be taken from us. But all “unlikely” means is the possibility of your life becoming meaningless, and the universe disintegrating and being ground to dust with everything in it, is “unlikely.”

And the last thing he would have seen on this earth was me, helping the monsters.
It was the longest forty five minutes of my life, and I couldn’t really explain to my wife what I felt, for you cannot share worry like that until it is over, it doesn’t diminish it for you, it multiplies on the telling.

He was fine, of course, and woke up happy as ever, and amused the staff with his antics until we could take him home.

It was a little thing, but it seemed the world to me, and I hope it’s never surpassed by any other thing in my life. But that’s not likely. Life has lots of curve balls in it.

Sometimes you have to do the hard thing, even if you’re not 100% certain. You makes your bets, and you takes your chances, as they say. It’s cold comfort I’m sure, to know you did what you had to do, if things go badly.

“It would have been worse for him if you weren’t there,” they told me, and I believed them.

Put that on my gravestone, if it’s true.

Beware Justin Gotta

Guten tag

Goodness, this house design thing is getting complicated.

Yes, yes it is.

Who’s Justin Gotta, you ask? Why he’s your consultant for house design, decorating, work, home, play, finances, politics, childrearing…

Let me explain.

I’ve discovered a rule of thumb that has carried me through my life without disappointment for many years. I came to these two realizations, this two pronged observation, observing customers’ as well as employees’ behavior. I realized only later that it applied to almost any stripe of life as well. Here it is:

Part 1: When the customer uses the word “just” in a sentence, you’re going to hear something dumb.

Example: “Why don’t you just build the second floor first, we have the lumber for that, and slip the first floor under it later? Why can’t we just do that?”

Or: “Why can’t we just make the house two thousand square feet bigger for no money?

Part2: When an employee uses the words “I gotta” in a sentence, it’s going to be followed by something stupid, or a lie, or a toxic admixture of mendacity and foolishness.

Example: “I can’t work today because I gotta…”

I’m not going to bother finishing that sentence, because it doesn’t matter what follows; it’ll be really dumb, or a fib, likely both, I assure you.

On one hand, I’ve had employees come to me and ask me if they could please leave work fifteen minutes early on Friday afternoon, because they had to go to chemotherapy. They scheduled their treatments on Fridays in the afternoon so they could recover in time for Monday.

People like that never use the words “I gotta.”

The “I gotta” is a sort of a vestigal verbal tail, left over from the teen years, used for trying to weasel out of your obligations or get treatment you don’t deserve by appealing to a deus ex machina, an overriding imaginary obligation that makes further discussion or disputation impossible:

“But I said I gotta have Wednesday off! Didn’t you hear me? I gotta! It’s not like I have a choice in the matter, I gotta pick up my brother and go to the casino and get loaded and then I gotta get another day off in a couple weeks to go to court for missing my child support payments that I blew at the racetrack on the way home from the casino and the barroom.”

“I just gotta.”

Keeping a watchful eye out for those two terms has served me in good stead lo these many years. And I always give as good as I get, so I’m careful to beware of them lest they appear in my own sentences.

Customers, beware the just and gottas on your own end, as well. Like an accusing index finger, the just and gottas generally have a malefactor on both ends of them.

If you hear: “We were going to work at your house this week but we gotta…”

Oh no. We gotta. The “we gotta” is an especially virulent form of the virus, and has been known to wipe out entire work weeks. Beware.

“Can’t you just pay us in advance? Because we gotta…”

This is the equivalent of the plague sweeping a medieval town. If you spot the dreaded we gotta, in the same sentence, or egads, the same prepositional phrase as can’t you just?, abandon all hope. There is nothing left for you but prayer.

I began to notice that the rule applied to everything in life, not just work. It’s as close to the Golden Rule as I’ve ever gotten, and I’m no philosopher. Think about it.

It’s charming to remember a time when that jug eared martian from Texas, Ross Perot was a legitimate presidential candidate, and whose whole party platform consisted of saying “Why can’t we just…?” about everything. Why can’t we just tell those Palestinians and Jews to knock it off? Why can’t we just raise the gas tax fifty cents? Why can’t we just run the federal government out of a Motel 6 in Austin?

And so forth. It’s a testament to the attraction of the “just” and “gotta” that he got as far as he did, and likewise a testament to the good sense of the electorate that finally realized he just a cross between your boss saying: “Why can’t you just work on Christmas eve for free?” and your plumber telling you he couldn’t come for two days because “I gotta wax my boat”

And so dear reader, remember, when someone says: Why don’t you “Just do it?” tell them you don’t “just” become a two hundred and seventy pound mass of muscle who runs as fast as a sprinter by buying shoes. When you hear: “Why don’t we just get five gay men to decorate our shabby apartment on television, or: “I gotta talk to the president again and dictate American foreign policy from a ditch by the side of the road, why can’t we just ..,” caution is called for.

Beware Justin Gotta.

Beating the Kitchen to Death

I warned you this room is important. Two days of me harping on it is the least worship it deserves.

Back when people were carpeting their kitchens and watching Mary Tyler Moore feed Rhoda in her apartment, there was a fetish for “Galley Kitchens.” It was the love child of the house as “a machine for living” approach to home design. If you ask me, that was simply assuming human beings were robots, and deliberately making things ugly as proof that they were more “useful.”
Well, galley kitchens were awful, and I don’t want to sit in a bean bag chair and eat fondue, with Rhoda, thanks, anyway.

Some things aren’t simple. Kitchens are complicated. People are not all identical. Simple, identical rules for kitchen design are unlikely to make even a large minority of people happy. And unfortunately, kitchen design help mostly consists of a clerk helping you to ram as many kitchen cabinets as will fit in the area you’ve got for a kitchen, and little else. And I’ve already told you- you have too many cabinets, and not enough pantry.

The idea that fewer steps between the three main work stations in the kitchen- the sink, the stove, and the refrigerator- makes the kitchen more efficient drove a design flurry of really small kitchens for a while. Then people got tired of smashing their shin on the dishwasher when they tried to get between it and the opposite counter, dodging around the refrigerator door to unload more than one item to a staging area at a time, holding five bowls of ingredients while manning the skillet because there wasn’t enough counter between the sink and the stove, or the stove and the frig, or both, and realizing that not only was their efficient kitchen too small, the designer forgot two main work areas completely: mixing, and serving.

The iron triangle of kitchen design was 21 feet total between sink, stove, and refrigerator. Period. They taught me nothing else about kitchen design at architecture school. And I ignore that, so perhaps a refund is in order. I won’t hold my breath.

As houses stated to get much bigger, and the kitchen could afford more elbow room, the idea of that 21 feet made for some really strange layouts, with a logjam in one corner, and yards of undifferentiated counters and cabinets all over the rest of the room.

Here’s what I’ve learned, watching lots of people struggle with, or enjoy, their kitchens:
-Forget the old triangle, it’s: sink, stove, microwave, refrigerator, preparation.

-The sink usually has a strainer next to it. Make a little doll that looks like your kitchen designer and shove pins in it if they claim that area counts towards counter space. Ditto any counter used to eat at. Ditto counter that gets appliances on it. If there’s stuff on it all the time, you can’t use it. You’re going to need lots of space at waist level to cook things, and you won’t find it under the dish drainer.

-If you plant the preparation area in the middle, the old triangle can expand. Take stuff out of the refrigerator, and you can place it on the prep area for use at the sink or stove. You usually do that anyway. Put the cabinet with glasses near the refrigerator, not the sink, and you’ll keep a lot of civilians out of the food preparation loop. They drink things out of the refrigerator now. Putting the glasses next to the tapwater is so, well, pre-Evian.

-The microwave has little to do with the stove. Give it its own place, as we discussed before, with room nearby, and you’ll be glad you did. Defrosted food from the microwave generally needs to be prepared further, and having it right over the stove, above eye level for many people, makes no sense. Put it in the island or something, don’t make me tell you again.

-If the counter’s not stone, put a patch of stone in whatever you’ve got for the counter, in the prep area. Good for making pastry, and double extra good for putting a hot thing from the stove, sink, or microwave down without delay, and skip looking for something to protect the counter from the heat, failing and burning yourself.

In this modern world, where we’re expected to pick over our trash like raccoons, the old paradigm of a little barrel under the sink for everything trashlike won’t cut it any more. Make easy-to-use segregated bins for however many types of trash and recyclables you need to sort, and sort them before they go in, not (ugh) after. Spend ten cents on your kitchen cabinetry and all the rest of your money on the hardware that makes the drawers and doors and slide in/out stuff work for the trash, because you’ll wear that out faster than any other thing in the kitchen, and curse the blasted thing more than any other thing that fails.

Remember the kitchen isn’t just being used for food preparation anymore. Don’t count any area that’s being used for something else domestic as food prep areas, or you’ll end up with olive oil on your kid’s homework, or butter on your television. The kitchen’s bigger because it’s not just a kitchen anymore.

-Drawers are too rare in the kitchen. In general, drawers inside cabinet doors should just be drawers. Use really nice ball bearing slides for the drawers, rated for 100 pounds, and you’ll enjoy the smooth feel of the drawer action instead of the banging around of the cabinets doors you get trying to pull out a drawer inside a cabinet with cheap nylon runners.

-If you must have wood countertops, or freestanding wood furniture instead of an island or counter, bless you, but remember to put them in the prep area, and enjoy the rich grain and color. Put it anywhere near the sink or the stove only if you enjoy the rich patina and invigorating colorations of scorch marks and mildew.

If you don’t want to make it too big, put every one of the work nodes no more than ten feet from the central work node, the preparation area. Using that arithmetic, nothing is more than twenty feet from everything else.

Set aside a place to hide in there, even if it’s just a little niche, to talk on the phone.

What’s for dinner?

How About the Kitchen?

Good morning all.

Kitchens cost all the money. Bathrooms are expensive too, especially when you figure by cost per square foot, but there’s a lot of pricey stuff in a kitchen, and lots of utilities that have to serve it.

In the modern home, the kitchen is the most important room in the house. We’ve integrated at least casual eating in the room itself, and generally the family room is at least attached to the kitchen, if not part of it entirely.

It wasn’t always this way, you know. There was a time in the distant past when the smell of cooking in the home was considered objectionable, and the kitchen was located with an eye to segregating it entirely from the living areas. Big old post-revolutionary homes sometimes had the kitchen in separate buildings entirely, and the food was brought into the house only when ready to be served.

Boston Chicken take-out notwithstanding, we don’t do it that way anymore. We’re our own scullery maids now, and the idea of banishing the food preparation to another world is alien to us.

The common folk always had it right, if the aristocrats didn’t. The average colonial home had a great big fireplace in a common room, and the fireplace served as furnace, stove, oven, and light, and the room was where the daily activities of the entire family were performed.

Gathering in a room like this is familial and pleasant. Or it should be, if your builder knows what he’s doing, and you know what to ask for. Let’s see if we can help.

The floor needs to be hard, of course. There was a short lived flurry of kitchens with carpeting in them about thirty years ago, as I recall, but the first grape juice spill changed that notion right quick, I imagine. Wall to wall carpeting for the masses was still a novelty then, and like all items for the home that suddenly become both available and inexpensive, there’s a lot of overkill for a time until people get some perspective. Now that I think about it, the cheap carpet craze didn’t stop there, people here and there carpeted their walls too.

No, I’m not making this up.

The seventies were pretty bad for interior decoration if I remember correctly. Everything was a fad, and it was all bad, like carpeting on the wall. Avocado colored appliances. Stick on mirror tiles. Parquet stick on floors. Dizzying geometric wall paper. Flocked dizzying geometric wallpaper. Hippy crap mixed in with Art Deco furniture knock-offs. Horrible ersatz cartoon colonial furniture, with the proportions all wrong, the distressing done in what seemed like a fussy fashion, but with a hatchet, and all in that drab brown stain that turned people off to the term “Early American” for two decades at least.

Paneling. Everywhere.

Blue siding with cocoa brown trim. Gold shag carpeting. Stick-on bricks. Bean bag chairs. Naugahyde recliners. Plastic drinking glasses. Chrome furniture.

Couple shiny powder blue polyester fabric on the furniture with shiny powder blue Qiana leisure suits, and the lack of friction ends you up on the floor like you’re riding down a log flume.

Unexplained track lighting. Wrought iron everything. “Mediterranean” console televisions.…
I, I, um, I’m sorry. I went down the seventies rabbit hole, and went into shock. I picture all that stuff, with the Partridge Family on the TV, and Nixon, Agnew, Ford and Carter as the decade’s Mount Rushmore, and I want to go back in time, and become an arsonist. It was all bad. Bad, bad, bad.

You don’t believe me? Too young to have known it, or older, but in denial? I typed “70s decorating” into Google, and it came back with a site featuring decorating bibliographies by decade. The 70s started with:

Goldman, Phyllis W. Decorate With Felt. New York: Crowell, 1973

Thanks, Phyllis, but I’ll pass.

Where were we before I wigged out? Oh yes, the non-carpeted kitchen. Except for a short period in the eighties where rubber industrial flooring and cork tiles were the rage, and an unfortunate period a decade ago when people resurrected Frank Lloyd Wright’s very bad idea of dyed concrete floors with the heat right in them, (I’m pretty sure we don’t think living in the garage is a bad idea just because the floor’s cold- concrete floors are AWFUL!) flooring in the kitchen has been 50/50 split between tile and wood. Pick your poison. They’re both fine.

I like differentiating the food preparation areas from the informal eating and casual rumpus areas by putting tile on the floor. I’ve put a two foot wide strip of tile along the flooring at the cabinets, with the rest wood, with good results too. Make sure there’s no bump of any kind where the disparate flooring meets, lest ye find yourself face down on the floor in a bowl of hot something. These are the details that matter, and are often overlooked, and haunt you day and night.

Okay, now blow twenty five thousand on cabinets.

What else can I say about them? They cost a fortune, even though they’re made in the land of the fortune cookie now, probably.

In general, there’s too many of them. If you have a plan that shows very long runs of cabinets, trash it and have the builder put in a pantry. A real walk in room, with open shelves on three sides, and a window on the end, don’t forget that, is so much nicer than opening a million cabinets looking for what you want. You can close the door on the clutter, too, so the open shelving’s terrific. If you don’t have the space, a pantry closet adjacent to the food prep area will do.

In general, they’re numbingly repetitive. Box after box, hanging on the wall, all essentially the same, is dull. Mix in open shelving, vary the counter heights, Vary the cabinet heights, make some deeper than others, and generally make the place more interesting and useful by doing so.
Cabinets are often distressed these days, and might as well be right out of the gate. They will be sooner than later anyway. The room gets a lot of use now, and not just for cooking, so make it as homey as you can.

Dishes stack neatly, and open shelving for them won’t look as messy as it sounds. Putting lesser used patterns behind glass doors protects them from dust between holiday meals, and you can still display them.

Lay off the oak on the cabinet doors, will ya? It has a coarse, sawtooth grain that’s at odds with many of the common styles of cabinets. Mission yes, medieval, yes, colonial revival, no. And when you tire of them, (trust me, you will) the open grain paints up lousy.

Never let the side of the refrigerator show. Build an enclosure for it or something. Cabinets on both sides, anything.

Island cooktops shouldn’t be across a short stretch of countertop to counter stool seating. Getting second degree burns from bacon splatters while eating your cereal is an overrated morning amusement, in my book.

Rethink the ubiquitous microwave integrated into the range hood. It locates the item coming out of microwave, some times scalding hot, above eye level for many people. It’s a greasy location too, over the burners, and either the microwave has to be small, or the clearance between it and the burners suffers. Sometimes bad ideas become industry standards. This is one of those.

Try locating the microwave in the island. It’s dead storage in there for the most part, anyway, and you don’t need as much of that now that you have that pantry. Our nine year old son can make his own popcorn at that height, and hot items come out and are placed on the counter just above, instead of being dropped all over yourself, the stove, and the floor if the microwave’s over the stove, five feet up.

A few more things:

Make sure there’s countertop on both sides of the cooktop. Even in cramped quarters, avoid the mistake of placing the refrigerator right next to the stove. You need places to stage the items coming on and off the stove.

The cabinet over the refrigerator should be flush with the face of the refrigerator, or it’s worthless.

Window, or windows over the sink. I will brook no argument on this. A blank wall, or, egad, a cabinet face, should get a designer jail time.

Anyone who gives you a detailed reason why the dishwasher HAS to be to the right of the sink, because most people are right handed and blah blah blah, is drinking cooking sherry and after-shave when no one’s looking, I suspect. You load the dishwasher with both hands, and unload it in every direction. Put it where it fits.

And look out for people who tell you to put the dishwasher near the seating area, not the sink, “because that’s where the dishes are.” I suppose that’s true for people who lick their plates like a puppy instead of scraping gristle into the trash, and rinsing the dish before loading, but with that sort of logic, you’ll have a washer and a dryer for nightstands, “because that’s where the sheets are.”

More Kitchen Ruminations on Monday.