Remodeling Our Hut Part 5: The ONE Thing(s)

As we continue to work on house plans for our modest remodeling project, I think we may be driving our plan designer just a tad insane.

  We bought our own design software and it has been a wonderful help for us, but the fact is, we're not architects or designers and we overlook the problems she can see.   We've been through at least four of the designer's revisions already and I'm sure there's more to come.  

In her last email, she urged me to actually decide on something, "So my advice, is to find the one thing in addition/remodel you can't live without...what's the one thing that we absolutely need to do and then let everything else fall in place around it."

Well, she's right, I have to concentrate on The One Thing.  Which would be?  Ummmmm.....the mudroom? 

But just as the thigh bone's connected to the knee bone and the knee bone's connected to the shin bone etc., so the mudroom is connected to the kitchen and the kitchen's connected to the dining room and, well, you get it.  It's all connected.  And six inches here or there makes a big difference in a small home.

In a way, this whole process is reminiscent of a poker game, only with higher stakes. 

Designer: 'I'll see you one closet in the mudroom but I'll raise you by losing your countertop space in the kitchen'.  

Us: 'I'll see your lost countertop space and raise you by moving the stove closer to the sink.'   

Everything is a trade off when square footage is at a premium.  We can't figure out how to put a nook in the tiny room that will look the way we'd like and still see the silly garden, so we've given up on playing nooky and are on the search for other options.  

After mulling the plans over endlessly with our friends (aren't you glad you don't have to listen to ALL of this?  Our poor friends......) I finally sent our last revision to the designer late last night.   Now we wait and see how this hand plays out.

None of the homes we've toured have been the size of ours.  I'm sure there are other new homes in the 1500 sq. ft. range still being built out there, but let's face it, they don't make it to the elite 'Showcase of New Homes'.  For the contractors, I suppose it would be like entering a Shetland pony into the Kentucky Derby; after all, you want to impress potential clients with your skills, not have them smirking. 

 

(By the way, what happened to the Tiny House Movement?  Apparently around here, it didn't catch on.)

The open concept is still the Thing to Have right now.  Almost every home is the same layout, the kitchen with an island and seating, a dining room table next to the island and the living room beyond.

 Though the beige couch above looks lovely, what happens when a toddler launches a spoonful of Spaghettios in that direction?

The picture below is sort of what our kitchen and casual dining area might look like, but again, this house is way bigger than ours.  I may have an island, but there won't be a sink on it because I will need the space.  

I guess what I'm struggling with here and with almost all of the open concept homes is the 'openness', for lack of a better word.

When I walk into any of these new homes, what do I see? 

Everything.

The vast spaces are impressive, true, but boy, I'd better be able to keep everything neat and tidy at all times if I lived in a house like this.  There's something to be said for having a little mystery.  (And rooms with doors that can be closed.)

Oddly enough, the biggest home on the tour in my earlier post, came in at a whopping 6009 sq ft (don't forget about those nine feet!) and with all of that space, had dedicated rooms for dining and living room separated by walls.  Even though it was a mansion, the rooms felt cozier.

I have been a fan of Sarah Susanka for years.  She is the author of 'The Not So Big House' and many other excellent books on the same topic.  In one of her articles she described meeting with the owners of a large new home who were unhappy.  They had built a McMansion, I guess, and though the views and room sizes were impressive, living in it was definitely not as pleasant as they'd hoped.  It didn't feel homey.  She also observed a party she'd attended in another grandiose home and found that most of the people would congregate in the kitchen, which was coincidentally, the smallest room in the public area with the lowest ceilings.   

It's the way we humans are, we crave shelter.  Little children love tents or possibly best of all, the big cardboard boxes appliances come in.  There's something comforting about a sense of enclosure.

I liken architecture to garden design.  Though we're not award-winning garden architects by a long shot, we borrowed a lot of their philosophies when we built this random plant menagerie of ours.  Carl had the idea of garden rooms in his head when we first planted the evergreens in a series of circles in 1980.  (We always called it our very own Three Ring Circus.) 

I'm very glad he had the foresight and the vision, it is always good to have a sense of mystery of what will be found around the corner.   The picture below is a satellite view of our insanity, taken last spring, I guess, since the apple trees around the dome in the formal garden are in bloom on the left.

 When I weed around here, I simply follow the sun around, if it gets too hot in one place, just haul your weed bucket to the shade.  And when people come to visit, they can't see the whole shebang at once, there's always just a small vista to draw the eye.  (And a place for me to hide stuff we're working on.) 

Though the open concept is bright and airy, there's nowhere to hide in this floor plan.

In this article, Ms. Susanka shares everything I'm hoping for our remodel to accomplish as we both grow older here at the hut.  

I guess there's not really just One Thing after all, it's a whole bunch of things that all boil down to one Big Thing.
 

Aging in Place is Everything.