American house architecture was much more exuberant in the 1920s than since. I’ve worked on houses from the 17th century through the 21st, and the 1920s can lay a claim to being the most useful and practical without giving up anything in the style department. They’re generally smaller than a contemporary house, but that’s a feature, not a bug, if you ask me. Most contemporary houses are huge because they waste a lot of space, and waste it in multiples while the occupants try to find a corner of their caverns to actually live in. If the houses were designed better, they could be smaller. They aren’t, so they can’t.
They were, in the twenties. It’s important to remember that compared to the walk-up rented apartments and ramshackle shacks the twenties homebuyer was moving from, they weren’t all that small. But a 2012 female person takes one look at the modest closet, and the 2012 male person vainly searches for seven feet of blank wall for their TV, and are disconsolate.
One of the most exuberant style items afoot back then architecturally was the faux thatched roof. That’s what you’re looking at there. The Arts and Crafts retreat to rusticity was in full play. But hobbit house roofers are hard to find in the 21st century, and so the homeowners had to find someone willing and a little unusual to plan the necessary assault on their roof and their checkbook.
The roof is a very large visual element on a house. 90 percent of them are blah expanses of asphalt tab shingles. Back a hundred years ago, you might find asphalt shingles, of course –the house in the picture might have had them as original equipment — but you’d be just as likely find slate, or sawn cedar, or heavier split shakes, or metal. They’d be laid in interesting patterns and a wider palette of colors than now, too. “What color gray do you want” is all they ask you at the lumberyard now.
I’ve repaired curved roofs like this. I cheated. If you lay cedar shingles on the lawn in the early morning, the sunny side shrinks and the damp, grass side expands, and they “cup” a good deal. You can bend them the rest of the way by hand and nail them down if you’re in a hurry. The steam box in the video is a much better method, of course. Well, “better” until you get the bill, anyway.
(From 2008: Please note that only four years later blue and brown is in complete remission)
Ten Dreadful Things That Have Become Housing Standards
I’ve been watching all the “Let’s have a housing makeover” shows. It’s interesting how many of them there are. Everyone seems to be interested in the design process now. There’s very little of what used to be the norm in home-improvement shows — pointing the camera at the people doing the hammer and nail work. Now it’s point a camera at the realtor, or the curtain guy, or the designer for the most part. They have elves do the work while the camera crew is at lunch, I guess.
Most people get their ideas about what to do in fashion by looking at what other people are wearing. Essentially, all the home rehab programs are fashion shows at this point; centered around the soft goods. I’m in the furniture business now, so it’s sort of my game, but I used to be more heavily into the building of the actual house, so there’s some things about the whole megillah that bug me.
They bug me because everyone is doing them because everyone is doing them. They are ugly; or nonsensical; or counterproductive; or wasteful; or mostly an ephemeral fad being written into concrete — always a bad idea. The decorative stuff is going to be painted over shortly or thrown in the dumpster too quickly, and the permanent installations are going to make the owners miserable for generations because they’re too expensive to get rid of.
So here’s my counsel. STOP DOING THIS:
1. Snout houses.
Stop nailing your house onto the ass end of your garage. I’m not going to explain myself. I shouldn’t have to. You are building a house for your car and living in a shack out back. Never ever ever do it.
2. Putting a flatscreen TV over your fireplace mantel.
Profoundly dumb. It’s tiring to look at screens above eye level when you are seated. Designers have given up doing their job integrating two things to look at in the same room, and so have stacked them. They’re not washer/dryers in a condo, people. You’re slouching in your chair and getting headaches and backaches trying to look at the thing. There’s a reason no one sits in the first row at the theater. Look down slightly at entertainers, and the entertainment, too.
3. Putting the microwave over the stove.
Reaching over a hot stove to remove dishes sometimes filled with superheated items, above eye level for most women and all children is profoundly dumb. It’s the greasiest place in the world, too. Put it in the island and your five year old can make their own popcorn.
4. Cooktops in islands with seating.
I love to have hot grease spatters launched at me while I’m seated across an island from the cook. The boiling cauldrons of water give a nice netherworldly effect as well.
5. Open plan in a big house.
Open plan is for little houses, so rooms can share some space with one another and counterfeit roominess. A big house with undifferentiated space is a airport lobby. Last time I checked, having doors doesn’t preclude a plan from being “open.” You just leave them open. Not having them does preclude you from closing off the rooms when you want to, though. Even small houses are better with rooms that can be closed,if you ask me.
6. Very high ceilings in a family room.
You’re trying to watch TV in there, or talk to one another, and the sound bangs around like an airport hangar. You’ve got an open plan so you get to listen to the dishwasher and refrigerator run, too. A two story bedroom is pretty dumb, too, but I don’t want to make a Top Eleven list.
7. Plastic everything.
Vinyl sided, rubber windows, plastic decking… Man, everybody’s living in a big rubber box nailed on the back of a garage. Wood, stone, masonry, glass, paint, people.
8. Ceiling fans everywhere.
Do you all really think you live in Casablanca? If I go into another ranch house with a ceiling fan hanging down from a 7 foot 6 inch ceiling, I’m going to go postal. If I can’t stand up in the middle of the room without getting a bruise or a haircut, you’re doing it wrong. There is no stratification of air in a house. Doesn’t happen. You’re screwing a window boxfan sideways to your ceiling. Stop it. Your house has AC anyway. And you live in Wisconsin. Cut it out.
9. Enormous jacuzzi tubs.
You can ooh and aah all you want when you go in the bathroom and see a big jetted tub with a window over it, and a skylight above, but I’ve got news for you: You will patronize your undertaker more often than you use that tub; 99% of humans will not bathe in front of a window; and the skylight will rain condensation every time you take a shower, forevermore. Strike three.
10. Blue and Brown.
I’ve lived through this three times now. I’ve ripped all this stuff out twice with customers muttering “What were they thinking?” Powder Blue and Cocoa Brown DO NOT go together under any circumstances, anywhere. Except of course in every room on every show on television.
(Author’s Note: There is no editor. Maybe I’ll hire one if you buy a goddamn book)
That rapscallion Bird Dog over to Maggie’s Farm linked to one of those titanic bits of news that apparently only warrants a mention on the last page of the Internet, while a few dozen well-to-do hipster doofuses have a hissy fit on the first fifty pages of all the newspapers.
NEW YORK
— The largest transfer of wealth from the public to private sector is
about to begin. The federal government will be bulk-selling the massive
portfolio of foreclosed homes now owned by HUD, Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac to private investors — vulture funds.
These homes, which are now the property of the U.S. government,
the U.S. taxpayer, U.S. citizens collectively, are going to be sold to
private investor conglomerates at extraordinarily large discounts to
real value.
You and I will not be allowed to participate. These investors will come from the private-equity and hedge-fund community, Goldman Sachs and its derivatives, as well as foreign sovereign wealth funds that can bring a billion dollars or more to each transaction.
Hmmm. The government is giving away all those practically free foreclosed houses you’ve been waiting and saving to purchase, to rapacious investors. Who’da thunkit? I mean, besides me, a year ago:
A “foreclosed house” is not a house. The jots and tittles have to be
filled in by the lawyers and clerks –who owes and owns what, what’s
required to call the house complete and safe for habitation — just like
you do before you dig the cellar hole. It is only a potential house.
Think of them as housing starts for future years, because the vast
majority of them won’t be ready to be sold for years. And since
practically no one is building any new houses, and household creation
plugs along, unspectacular but inexorable, those foreclosed houses are
not going to be sold for peanuts in the future, because they’re going to
represent the only game in town. Buy them or rent them, they’re going
to cost you real money.
Banks, especially big, national banks, are not realtors. They’re not
property managers. They have nothing in place to handle owning and
selling the property they have on their hands. They will never use a
retail approach to unloading them. They will sell them in huge blocks to
investors, unload them on the government –who will unload them on
favored investors — or demolish them. These investors will be risking a
great deal by buying real estate, and they’re going to demand an
enormous return on that investment. They are going to make the most
rapacious developers that built the houses in the first place look like
Pollyanna.
The people who are currently living in the foreclosed houses
“rent-free” while the bank’s lawyer scratches his head in front of a
judge saying: “I know that deed is around here somewhere” are actually
doing the bank a favor. They are of no use to the bank as paying
customers anymore, and the bank has already written them off, but they
will serve as a kind of disreputable housesitter for a year, maybe two,
saving the bank from paying someone to mow the lawn or otherwise look
after the place. By then the banks will have their foreclosure ducks in a row, and out in the street they’ll go, and into the now nascent, but soon to be gigantic foreclosure machine the house will go.
I’ll tell you something else. All those people who thought they were going to walk away from those houses and give them back to the banks? The banks are going to figure out the difference between the mortgage and what the house is sold for, which will be huge, sell those debts to lawyers –who’ll make the mafia or a first wife look reasonable — and they’ll use the court system as their own private strong-arm collectors, and hound those people to kingdom come.
Barring a sea change in governance, five years from now there will be nothing left to do but piss in the hole where the American housing industry once stood. It’ll still be smouldering from a subsidized public/private arson fire initiative, so even that might seem like a blessing when they’re done with it.
A day after we looked into the hole where hundreds of houses were being tenderly razed by the loving dozerblade of the caring banks under the benevolent gaze of the compassionate government, the tallest midgets in the intellectual circus are peeing into the smoking cellar holes to double down on proving me prescient again.
The Obama administration may turn thousands of government-owned
foreclosures into rental properties to help boost falling home prices.The
Federal Housing Finance Agency said Wednesday it is seeking input from
investors on how to rent homes owned by government-controlled mortgage
companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing
Administration.(Link)
In some insane alternate universe, persons believe this is a good idea.
In this bizarro world, people unable to afford a free house because they have no job will purchase an expensive house right next door if you’ll simply destroy the empty free house. Further, in this outre galaxy, the government-supervised rental of housing will brighten up neighborhoods, and renters will take better care of properties than owners. Okey dokey, then. See you down at Spacely’s when you need some sprockets, space real estate cadets.
You’ll have to bear with me, as I’m a little behind the times on these matters. We used to build good, solid, liveable houses, employed lots of people to do so at good wages, and then we’d sell them to customers who would live in them, usually by qualifying for a mortgage by having a job themselves. I fear you’re going to have to bail Tony Rezko, Charles Keating, Neil Bush, Susan McDougal, or someone similar out of jail, or look under whatever rock they might be under just now, and ask them how it’s going to work from here on in. Any five Senators will do in a pinch.
A little later on in the AP article, there is a bit of a clue of what we might expect:
A federal “request for information” released
Wednesday included an option for previous homeowners to rent out the
homes or for current renters to lease to own. Private investors could
also be allowed to manage the rental properties.
I see. The housing industry will now be run from Washington using the ColorTyme business plan.Sounds like paradise.
There’s no word on whether Bank of America and Wells Fargo will eventually be nationalized and run on a payday loan/ pawnshop hybrid model.
So it’s 10:00 AM, Saturday morning. About 65 degrees; sunny; not much wind. I was up at 5, but didn’t have the heart to roust the teen early. We have plenty of time. We’re going to paint one side of our 1901 Victorian.
We have a three-year plan to fix up the house. We’re one year in and holding our own. The order of things is skewed. We have next-to-no money, so we have to concentrate on labor-intensive things, not material-intensive things first. We don’t have a lot of time, either, but that’s an excuse to go fast, not to avoid things.
One of our lovely neighbors recently vinyl-sided their house, and told us about it. Vinyl siding is common here. Vinyl siding is sold as a curative, but it’s a palliative. It’s the medical marijuana of home improvement. You still have cancer but you don’t care as much. The neighbor told us the first estimate to side their house, which is smaller than our house, was $19,000. Since I purchased my house for $24,000, this seemed less than a value. They ended up hiring a local man who charged them $11,000. If I had $11k and few months, I could renovate the entire inside and outside of my home and quadruple its value. Back when I still painted stranger’s houses, I could have painted their house eight times with $19k. That’s thirty-five to forty years of fresh paint on your house for the same money. A plastic winding sheet for your house seems more appetizing to the average American now, for reasons that escape me.
It’s been a while since I bought housepaint. I was astonished to find the price had roughly doubled. It was almost fifty bucks a gallon for Ben Moore Moorgard latex flat; so painting one side of my house would cost about a hunnerd, and take a day. We painted the front last year. The back needs more repairs first, the other side needs… I dunno, prayers or a missile strike or something first. I’ll get to it.
There’s the side we’re doing. It’s two-and-a-half stories on a wild slope inside some trees, guarded by legions of mosquitoes. I execrate everything the former owners did to the place, and the nasty blue color the place was schmeared with is right at the top of the list; right up there with the cedar shingles they wallpapered our bedroom with.
I used to build gas stations, and we’d occasionally be hired to decommission a gas station. We removed the storage tanks and dispensers and so forth, then all the signage. Then we were instructed to paint the entire place, every last surface, with a non-descript, blah, nasty blue color that would throw off any person trying to divine what kind of gasoline used to be served there by any color scheme left showing. The color was deliberately chosen to be ugly. Our house was painted that blue color, and it drove me around the bend, every square inch of it, every time I looked at it. It’s like therapy, not work, to cover it up
I’m in a hurry and must be efficient. I start at the hardest, highest spot, and do everything while I’m there. I palm sand the entire thing, caulk the seams, putty any holes, and paint the siding and the trim at the same time. You’ve been told by a middle-aged woman wearing too much makeup wearing an orange vest in a big warehouse that sells powerwashers that you want to powerwash your house first. No you don’t.
The paint might cost fitty a gallon, but it covers in one shot, so it’s worth the dough. Between all the gathering of stuff and so forth, this is all we had done by noon. LUNCH!
Momo le chat offered to fix lunch for us, but we don’t have a working grill yet, so we had to settle for food my wife made instead. We spent a quiet moment in the back yard, enjoying the sunshine. Winter beats on you like a LaMotta every year, so every nice day is like a sunny Christmas:
I read the Intertunnel, and am instructed constantly that children are nothing but rude, useless drains on one’s pocketbook, and pointless leeches on society and Mother Nature. I bet yours are, if you write things like that — or would be, if you’d managed to have any children instead of playing World of Warcraft in your mom’s basement until you’re old enough to retire on Social Security. Mine are endlessly useful and productive and amusing.
After finishing the moles and sandwiches, we’ve got to get on our horse and ride. Here is a rare sighting of the author in his native habitat. Don’t approach him too closely; he spooks easily and lashes out when startled:
The siding is “Providence Olive.” The trim is “Montgomery White,” which my son the wag calls monkey white. The accent color seen later is “Mayflower Red.”
Here you can look in our bedroom windows, you pervert:
That’s my office on the right. It has huge windows on the four faceted sides of it, the largest of which is five feet square. It’s a fantastic place to write. I wish I knew how to write; then life would be perfect:
Here I am again. I’m desperately handsome, and poorly dressed, which is my signature look:
We decided to press on through before eating dinner, and worked until we finished at 6:30. My heir painted the masonry “Tudor Brown,” and a lot of the lowest boards on the siding, which are called a water table. I’m the only person you know that knows what the lowest boards on your siding are called; so I have that going for me.
Some deranged persons have removed 9 or 10 windows from my house, and put plywood over the openings. I am not a violent man, but I’m willing to learn if I meet these people. I imagine they thought they were saving money on heat, but since the majority of the windows they removed faced south, southeast, or southwest, they ended up losing all the solar gain of the windows instead. Then they put tacky ceiling fans in every room with the money they “saved.” I’ll put the windows back some day when we’re rich.
The ceiling fans went to the dump on day one.
Tag: housing
sippicancottage
A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.
Recent Comments