Wha, how do you put your shoes on? I’m 5’ 6", and I expect to be able to sit on my bed, with my feet on the floor. My knees at a right angle. If I can’t do this, the bed is too high (this is UK).
Four or five years is the norm here, apparently
In the US you are correct so far as public spaces are concerned, but they are allowable in the home. Otherwise there would be no market for a double cylinder lockset. When I was living in a dodgy neighborhood in a condo with a window close to the front door, I installed one but had a key on a nail in case of fire.
In Europe, more construction is concrete, or otherwise fire proof, than in the US.
From my time in Germany as a youngster, the OPs description definitely runs true. Doors for every room with locks on them. It was funny because it was these old timey locks that basically used miniature medieval keys, big blocky things - you could actually peek through the keyhole. A couple of the doors we just took off the hinges and stored away to make space.
But this was way back early 80s.
I’ve often seen that situation where the front door is barely used. Is the door there out of some vestigial sense that the house ought to have a front door even if it’s rarely ever used? If the side door is the most commonly used door, should it’s be considered the main door?
It’s all just part of the tradition of keeping ‘things for best’; the parlour no-one but guests ever sits in, the good china that only gets brought out for ‘company’, and the front door that’s only opened for occasions like weddings, funerals and visits from special visitors.
When I was little, we lived in a house without a front door, though the rest of the design was like the standard houses in the area which all had one, and there was an obvious place in the layout where it ‘should’ have been (in fact, the next owners added one as part of an extension). The house was originally one part of the Duke of Westminster’s estate, rented out to estate workers. The story I got told goes; the Duke once went round to see one of the tenants, and being a Duke, therefore considering himself a special visitor, went to the front door. The tenants never used the front door, and when they tried to open it, it’d swelled up, and stuck. They couldn’t budge the thing. He had to go round the kitchen door, like the milkman and the other common folk. He was, according to the tale, so peeved about this that the next bunch of houses he had built were laid out almost exactly the same as the previous lot, but without a front door; if the tenants weren’t going to use the front door, they weren’t going to get one.
elmers magical liquid
these days its referred as a “mud room” because its where ya take all the damp wet stuff off when it rains and snows …here in the southern ca desert it rarely does either so they don’t build em and when it does rain ya either take em off outside or ya get wet and muddy floors ……
I’ve lived in Aus most of my life. Our 1960’s ranch-style house in Arizona was open-plan with corridors and built-in kitchen cupboards. It had two American-style bathrooms. My 1990’s tract house in Melbourne is open-plan without corridors, and has built in cupboards. We have an American-style en-suite, and an English-style back bathroom and separate toilet.
The old(pre-war) houses I’ve lived in in Melbourne were built with a separate out-house, then converted to indoor plumbing. The earlier conversions showed the cultural and regulatory effects of the earlier standard: separate toilet, at least two doors. In our current house, there is only one door between the kitchen and the toilet. The fact that the toilet is separate from the bath is because, with shared facilities, it lets one person use the toilet while another is using the shower. But it’s a very cheap house, and the toilet doesn’t have a sink, so you still need to go to the laundry or use the shower room to wash your hands.
The old houses were all corridor/hallway with doors. Except in the smallest town-houses, the hallway walls were structural walls (supporting the roof) There was no heating in Melbourne before the 1980’s, and you closed all doors to keep the heat in. There was no built-in storage or bench space at all. In the bedrooms you’d put a wardrobe and a bed: in the kitchen a kitchen cupboard and a kitchen table.
In the oldest houses, the kitchens were attached at the back, as was the washroom. In our house in PNG, the kitchen was entirely separate, to reduce fire risk, but in Melbourne the separation reflected (in expensive houses) the separation of function, and (in poor houses) the separation of building materials: you’d make the bedroom and parlour as nice as you could, and kitchen as cheap as you could.
I’ll also note that in London, the big townhouses of the very rich were subdivided into “flats”. That gave a structural organization that did not reflect the original design of the building. In Germany, a traditional ordinary was to live for middle-class city-dwellers was a walk-up apartment building organized around a central courtyard, You didn’t get “ranch house” or “cottage” floor plans in that kind of building.
Who keeps shoes in the bedroom? Disgusting. I have slippers next to my bed. You just slide your toes into them and stand up.
The oldest building I’ve lived in was a pre-war apartment building in NYC. It had a full bathroom (toilet, sink, tub with shower) near the bedrooms, and it had what we called the “water closet” in the kitchen. It was a large closet with a toilet in it. There was a door, but if you wanted to wash your hands after using the toilet, you used the kitchen sink, which was just on the other side of the wall.
(The water closet also had a large shelf above the toilet, up high, out of reach of children. The building had tall ceilings, so there was lots of room there. We kept all our toxic cleaning materials and such up there.)
For starters, everybody who’s ever rented one room. Or anybody who doesn’t have a dressing room. Wanna get even more shocked? In Europe, it’s common for people to share rooms with other people they don’t have sex with! There are families of six living in homes with three bedrooms and one bathroom.
Wait… aren’t you also the poster who thought any hotel that doesn’t have a kitchenette in every room is a dumpster?
Your main issue doesn’t seem to be even with “OMG how come Euros do things differently”, you begin by having problems with the concept of “population density”. And yeah, also with understanding that it’s called “abroad” because it’s not your backyard.
This was the type of modular kitchen furniture I was talking about. Notice how it is completely free standing.
Get yourself a sink, add an oven, and you’re all set.
Or you can get a complete kit, like this:
They can get even cheaper (and much more expensive), but notice how it’s mostly just a couple of large pieces. It’s not hard to find a way to make that fit the next kitchen you move to. That tall portion on the left can be placed on an opposite wall, even. It can be completely rearranged. The upper cabinets just screw into the wall. No need to find the studs, because your walls are most likely made of some kind of stone or brick.
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Long ago I had a girlfriend who’d spent a year at the Sorbonne. She mentioned that Parisian apartment rents were so high almost all undergraduates either lived with their parents or had two or three roommates in an apartment, not necessarily in separate bedrooms.
Nowadays San Francisco is getting there. When I looked a year ago the only district where the minimum rent for a 1br apartment was under $3,000 a month was Outer Sunset, and there it was $2,800; popular hotspots like Marina were over $4,000. Almost everyone single rents a room instead of a whole apartment.
DesertWife’s daughter and her husband both make good money and they are living in the upper floor of a house in Central Richmond that was converted into an apartment. Some single guy lives on the bottom floor and the owner is living in the basement. A single guy I know had two bedroom renters in his home in Mission Terrace and was renovating the basement so he could put a third in there. Even with the three renters, the mortgage would not be covered but it was close, he said.
Paris is a long way from that. The cheapest rents in Paris proper are at about €550-600. For € 700, you’ll find something, probably even livable.
On the other hand, I suspect that surfaces are much smaller. One bedroom means 15-20 square meters (160-220 square feet, apparently).
*Your *shoes might be disgusting.
Yeah, what’s disgusting about shoes?
I keep my underwear in my bedroom, and that goes next to my butt.
(No skid marks, though.)
I have a laundry basket in my bedroom - the horror!