Actually, my beef with the entitlement whores who winge about the size of bedrooms, especially kid and guest bedrooms - how the fuck long do they expect people to need to be in a bedroom? All it really needs is space for the bed, a dresser [if it isnt tucked into the walk in closet] a computer desk for doing homework and a bookshelf on one wall, and a bedside table [or one on each side of a double bed for the guest room]
Do you really need to be able to do a dance recital in the bedroom?
We were expected to sleep and do our homework in the bedroom. I had a double bed only because we had one left from downsizing from the old house. [my parents were not going to throw away a 200 year old cherry 4 poster ] Socializing was done in the living room with the parents and adult guests, if it was us kids we had the rec room in the basement. Meals were at the dinner table, tv was watched with the adults in the living room, or on the ancient black and white tv in the basement rec room. The assorted toys were in chests or on shelves in the rec room. Other than the bed, and a floor to ceiling bookshelf I had a desk and a single bedside table, and a tallboy that had been knocking around in the family for a hundred years or so. I did not have a walk in closet [not in a 60s tract house, though we bought it in 70] and it had a single bathroom upstairs that had the classic tub/shower combi and a washroom off the kitchen downstairs. No master ensuite, no walk in closets for anybody. Avocado tiles in the upstairs bathroom, avocado appliances in the kitchen. Linoleum floor, avocado green sculptured rug. Very fabulous 60s. [It has been renovated since them, in the late 80s] If any one of the entitlement whores walked into it, they would probably turn around and walk out because it hasn’t been updated in 20 years. I should go take pictures of the kitchen and post them, it is rather a nice one, though it doesn’t have granite nor stainless steel.:rolleyes:
I have to chuckle over the “dated” comments sometimes, too - honey, you’d die in our house. Popcorn ceilings, original windows, 30 year old vanities, cheap kitchen cabinets - but it’s a nice, clean house, and it does everything a house is supposed to do.
It’s understandable when they’re talking about “dated” original cabinets in poor condition painted in 70s colors, or shag carpet in the bathroom or something. But the vast majority of times the “dated” comments occur on House Hunters it’s because the kitchen faucet is (gasp!) six years old! Or because because the washer and dryer aren’t stackable front-loaders in a cool color - instead they’re (horrors!) seven year old front loaders that are still in perfect condition. (Those are both actual examples I’ve seen on these shows).
Entitlement Whores rarely films in my area. I’ve only seen two shows. One of them concentrated on “loft” style condos (former factories) which have been the rage here in our RE market for the last couple of years. The other focused on antique – IIRC the family involved with that chose a rambling (updated) farmhouse not far from the city that dated from the early 1800s.
I daresay they probably don’t come here more often because most of our housing stock is small, definitely NOT open concept, and is probably outdated by 20+ years. Like my house
The kind of electric radiant floor heating that typically gets installed under tile or stone just to warm the floor up is fairly expensive to operate, when you consider it’s basically just warming your feet up.
Hydronic radiant floor heating can be an effective and efficient way to heat your whole house, but it would be in place of baseboard heating elements or forced air, etc., not an simple extra option for 1 room of the house.
So neither is something I’d expect to see installed in a rental home just because it has a stone kitchen floor.
My kids play in their bedrooms, do homework in their bedrooms and have all their stuff in there. When other kids come over to play with them, that’s where they go. Didn’t you ever ‘hang out’ in your room?
In my best friend’s house, the masterbedroom is 14 x 16 which is a good size. They have his and her’s closets and a large four piece master bath. The two other bedrooms are 8 x 7. Which means you can fit a twin bed and a dresser (which barely has enough room to open). The closets are two feet wide. No room for a desk or bookshelf.
My bedroom as a kid had exactly what your chidhood bedroom had just barely squeezed in. Compared to these, it was gigantic.
I am saying if they took some space from the master bedroom or closets or bathroom you could add a couple of feet to each bedroom and make it much more liveable for the kids.
(Of course, we are freaks since our daughter actually has the largest room in the house. We chose the slightly smaller room with more privacy.)
I don’t really care about granite countertops or crown moldings one way or the other.
I kind of like open floor plans to an extent. I like to be able to be in the kitchen when I have friends over without feeling like I’m missing everything that’s happening in the living room, but I can get mostly the same effect just by having the rooms next to each other, or at least having line-of-sight between them.
I positively can’t stand stainless steel appliances. They look cold, industrial and uninviting and always remind me of the dining hall I where I worked in college. The only reason anyone has been able to give me for why they’re so popular is that HGTV says they are, and home buyers listen to HGTV and decide that they should like them too. Maybe I just don’t get it, but I’d rather have my kitchen feel like part of my home, not part of a cafeteria.
Actually, if you house has the classic baseboard hot water heating, you can do water tube floor heating on a room by room basis, there is the possibility that you can pop sections of the floor, saw off the pipes to the baseboard radiators, braze on new segments that mate with the new in floor heating system, redo the floor, base in the tubes, and redo the rest of the floor with laminate, tiles or whatever. Won’t work if you are trying to preserve an antique floor, but most rentals go for quick and easy to maintain flooring.
Nope, basement rec room for hanging with kids, living room for hanging with adults. Hence we never had issues with having a visitor of the opposite sex, all socialization was done not in the bedroom. I suppose it would shock everybody to learn that we also put out toys away when we were not directly playing with them. One thing that cheeses me off is the bedrooms and living rooms absolutely strewn about with toys. It looks like an explosion in a toy shop. In general, we had probably 20 toys, and several of them were shared between my brother and I [legos, lincoln logs, erector set and electric car track being shared, each one counts as one even though they had lots of individual parts.]
Honest, mrAru and I combined couldn’t fill the average walk in closet between us. I have 4 pair of shoes, mrAru has 5 pair [he has 2 different pair of work boots, one with and one without steeltoes] I can not imagine having enough clothes to fill one of those huge walk ins that is the size of our back bedroom [9 feet x 9 feet/ 3 meters x 3 meters] Hubs has more clothing than I do mainly because he still has his full seabag. [actually 2 seabags, he still has his whole recruit set too. Last command, he could joke that he had boot camp issue older than his nubs:D]
There are certainly some folks out there with silly taste–but why should people contemplating a large outlay of money be called “whores”?
I once rented a 1940’s duplex that had two (2) walk-in closets; they make smaller bedrooms possible. My widowed mother built a house in 1953 that had a small master ensuite; my brother got the room because he was The Boy. Having more than one bathroom per house isn’t all that decadent.
Of course, some of these folks won’t be furnishing their places with two (2) family antiques–they must be trash!
The toys are never out unless the children are actively play with them. Every object has a home and is neatly put away. I assure you, you do not need a rec room for this (the majority of toy storage is in their rooms or cupboards in the living room).
People have come over to our house and asked if we are moving that’s how little we keep around. (We have to, we live in a small house, we would be tripping over things.)
I like stainless steel. We have a stainless steel fridge, dishwasher, and microwave. Once the oven finally dies, we’ll replace it with stainless as well. It’s no harder to keep clean than any other appliance I’ve owned.
We have corian which is stupidly easy to maintain and we can put hot pots on it. My grandmother’s house has had stone countertops since it was built in the early 70s and they still look good. She lives in Brazil where people don’t really make luxury kitchens and the countertop of choice there tends to be granite. My aunt’s house was built in 1992 and they installed granite then. It still looks new after almost twenty years. Granite if properly maintained can last for ages.
I do find the giant bathrooms with the massive jacuzzi tubs to be silly. My aunt’s house has one in the master and they’ve used it maybe three times in the last twenty years. I would rather do without the tub, and have a small shower and then a linen closet in the extra space.
We have crown molding in our house, but it looks appropriate to the house (an 1890s to 1900 Victorian style rowhouse). I don’t think I would put them in a craftsman or a modern style house.
Well, yeah, in Brazil anybody who can afford to spend a fortune on a fortune on a luxury kitchen can also afford servants to do all the cooking and cleaning.
That’s just it though, they don’t do luxury kitchens at all. The nice houses I’ve been to have granite counters, but the rest of the cabinets and finishes aren’t nearly as nice. The kitchens I’ve seen tend to be more cramped in general and galley style kitchens are popular. From what I’ve seen, granite isn’t considered to be a luxury finish. Granite is locally sourced and is used even as flooring.
I brought it up too point out that granite is fairly durable and if properly maintained can last for a long time. From what I’ve seen, you don’t need to do that much maintenance compared to other materials.
I like open floorplans because I am essentially a one-room girl. No matter how large or small my home is, I end up spending 99% of my time in one room and the rest might as well not exist. When I’ve lived solo in a one-bedroom, I usually couldn’t even be bothered to go into the bedroom to sleep- I’ve spent years passing up perfectly good beds in exchange for the living room futon. Any number of dens or offices or whatever would just be lost on me. If it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing in the living room.
At least with an open floor plan, the room I spent my time in would be large and have room for all my good stuff.
Whoever said hardwood floors were a trend must be pretty young. Wall-to-wall carpeting was a trend and thank goodness it finally faded. Builders started putting them into homes because they were cheaper and faster than wood floors, but nothing can compare to the beauty of wood floors. They are classic and timeless. Plus carpet holds dirt and dust.
I prefer a kitchen that has some openness, like a window to the dining room. But if I feel like leaving dirty dishes, I don’t want it all open to the main living area.
In case someone has not mentioned it - the pedestal sink thing - pretty but so impractical. It’s an old style that has been resurrected for those too young to remember. Personally, I like to be able to put things on my sink top and not have them fall off. If I had a pedestal sink, I’d probably remove it and put in a sink with cabinet - where I can also store things. A small powder room is the only place a pedestal sink makes sense to me.
Open concept does allow a builder to make a smaller house seem larger - thus selling an illusion of space. I think that’s one reason they started.
My grandparents lived in a 4 room house of which one was the kitchen - for about 5 people and no indoor bathroom. The house had a wood floor - raw wood, no finish or beauty. I was personally “trained” in an outhouse. My grandparents did not get an indoor bathroom until I was about 9 and then my grandmother still had to heat water on the wood burning kitchen stove for the bath.
Some people today are grateful to have any kind of place to put their head at night. So, yes, I do roll my eyes at some of the comments made by house hunters. And comments about not liking the color of the walls are just plain stupid. Get out the paint brush! Besides, when a person moves out, there are usually nail holes from pictures, so rooms ends up having to be painted anyway unless you put a picture in exactly the same place.
] Socializing was done in the living room with the parents and adult guests, if it was us kids we had the rec room in the basement. Meals were at the dinner table, tv was watched with the adults in the living room, or on the ancient black and white tv in the basement rec room. The assorted toys were in chests or on shelves in the rec room. Other than the bed, and a floor to ceiling bookshelf I had a desk and a single bedside table, and a tallboy that had been knocking around in the family for a hundred years or so. I did not have a walk in closet [not in a 60s tract house, though we bought it in 70] and it had a single bathroom upstairs that had the classic tub/shower combi and a washroom off the kitchen downstairs. No master ensuite, no walk in closets for anybody. Avocado tiles in the upstairs bathroom, avocado appliances in the kitchen. Linoleum floor, avocado green sculptured rug. Very fabulous 60s. [It has been renovated since them, in the late 80s] If any one of the entitlement whores walked into it, they would probably turn around and walk out because it hasn’t been updated in 20 years. I should go take pictures of the kitchen and post them, it is rather a nice one, though it doesn’t have granite nor stainless steel.:rolleyes: