What spiffy features would you put in a house?

In My Humble Opinion
61

A full-fledged private library. At least two stories tall, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and a big suite of windows. A fireplace, too.

Behind a hidden door (built out of a bookshelf), the private office from this book, with the cylindrical bookshelf-area built in a hollow in the ceiling, and only accessible via a ladder. This, my private study, would have no windows.

Extra-wide doors and hallways, large enough for at least 2 people to walk side by side, comfortably. Stairways, too. (If you’ve ever had to move large appliances, you’d know how handy this’d be.)

Concealed, but easily opened access panels in the walls, over all power, telephone, and water lines. With lots of room for expansion, should these ever need to be upgraded, or some unforeseen lines have to be installed in the future.

Blast shutters and gunports.

The floors of the bathrooms and kitchen would be slightly sloped towards the center, where a drain would be.

A half-bath for every person living there, plus 2.

A big, wall-sized, museum style display case, filled with historical weaponry.

Suits of Armor, and at least one (working) grandfather clock.

The dining room would have a full-sized print of Guernica dominating one wall.

A fence. A really tall, sturdy, fence, surrounding all my property. Actually, I should probably make that a full-fledged wall.

Arts and crafts room, with HUGE worktables, and ample storage space. And a TV.

There would be a built-in TV cabnet in the living room…but the whole thing would be hinged to swing out from the wall, allowing easy access to the cables and ports on the back of the TV equipment.

TV would be carefully positioned so there’d be no glare from the windows.

Human bone chandelier. (They can be fake bones. I’m not picky.)

Fake dungeon room in the basement, complete with skeletons chained to the walls.

Air conditioning. And little (?) airliner-style air vents in all the rooms.

62

We should mention if we particularly like or dislike somebody else’s ideas. :slight_smile:

63

A small industrial ice maker. One that makes those perfectly little square cubes.

I hate running out of ice!
FB

64

actually, the owners in the house we’re working on added one of these. they are cool, but suprisingly expensive for just ice. they run about a grand each.

65

FYI, Ice makers are about a thousand bucks.

66

Why are most exterior doors only 36" and many interior doors only 32"? Beds,couches, major appliances are all wider than these measurements, meaning that you have to take doors off fridges and stand matresses and couches on end to get this stuff into or out of many houses.

I’ve seen expensive homes with narrow hallways and doorways. The only way to get 42" or wider doorways and hallways is to custom- order your house “handicapped accessible”.

I also believe that all bathrooms and kitchens should have floor drains and that floors should be properly sloped to make these drains usable. An impossible request? Apparently it is, since even McMansion-class new homes don’t have drains in their most frequently wetted floors.

67

I want a soda fountain. It only needs to have one or two flavors (Coke, and maybe Dr Pepper if the additional spout doesn’t add prohibitively to the cost). I have no idea how you go about getting these things and how much it costs to set up and maintain. But our household goes through a case of soda a week, and the fresh fountain stuff tastes so much better.

68

  1. The way to get downstairs in my house will not be stairs, but via ramp. The only thing downstairs will be the bedrooms, a large TV/computer room, and a bathroom. Everything else is upstairs.

  2. Secret passageway leading into husband’s library (#4).

  3. My kitchen will look like an Irish pub. We’ll have a normal kitchen table, but also booths to sit in.

  4. My husband’s library will have a circular stained glass dome in the ceiling.

  5. I want a tower room like the one the redheaded kid slept in in “Cheaper by the Dozen.”

  6. Wrap-around porch with lots of chairs and tables, probably screened-in.

  7. Extra wide doorways. This is good for moving furniture and also makes your house wheelchair accessible. That’d be handy if you ever, say, had surgery and had to use one for a while, and it could also increase your chances of selling your house one day if you had a buyer who needed something like that.

  8. A bigass deck on the back of the house, big enough to have a party.

69

A Urinal. Someday…

70

I want is a bathtub long enough for me to stretch out in and subfloor heating of all tiled areas of the house.

A secret passage to a secret room would be cool.

Lots and lots of build in bookcases as well as glass front display cabinets for all my models.

And a cushy window seat with velvet drapes I could hide behind while I read.

71

Mine is hard to convey without uploading the plans. I love the notion of non-static living. The kitchen because of the special wiring required for large appliances (and the walk-in refrigerated pantry) needs to remain stationary, so in my dream-home it’s in the center of the house (very large, brick and stone with a dining room and fireplace) with long hallways running along two sides and a “service wing” (laundry, storage, and exit to garage) along on another. There are four other rooms in the house off the two hallways, each of which is connected to the next room on it’s wing by a short hallway off of which is a large full bath. Each room has lots of closet space and built in bookcases. Room (A) has a balcony, Room B has hardwood floors, Room C has detachable/reversible wall panels (it can go from light to dark by reversing the panels), Room D is mostly glass. Because of the design of the house, Room A can serve as the master BR, room B as the office, room C as a guest room, room D as a living room, OR you can jiggy it up every so often so that room A is the office, room B is a living room, room C is the master BR and room D is the master BR, or whatever.

For a vacation home (or for a guest house) I love the Rocio Romero designs.

(Needless to say, I’m single and I don’t intend to have kids.)

72

We bought a new house three years ago that has all kinds of cool stuff that I really like, such as a walkout basement, open floorplan all the way from the top floor to the basement, curved open staircases, etc. It’s not a mansion, just designed really well. We have two art niches with lights inside them on the main floor and another one on the upper floor. The back wall of the house is open 2 stories high, and floor-to-ceiling glass (Loewen ‘heat smart’ insulated glass).

After we moved in, I ran CAT 5e and RG-6 quad-shield to every room of the house. Two runs each. I also ran six RG-6 cables into the attic and left 30 feet of each coiled up in there, for upgrading to satellite systems or pulling additional cables into the downstairs area.

Next was whole-house audio. The living room, master bedroom, and ensuite all have speaker cable in the walls, which is fed to a wall plate for a volume control, and then down into the basement.

All of the wiring terminates into a room in the basement where I have network hubs, a cable TV amplifier, and a cool little device I bought called an Ocelot. The Ocelot connects to a computer with an RS-232 connection, and can drive X-10 automation controllers and infra-red inputs in and out. This is supremely cool. For instance, I can get an X-10 keypad, put it in my bedroom, and use it to send signals to the ocelot through the home’s electrical wiring. The ocelot can then fire infra-red signals to the stereo gear in the basement to turn on the stereo and switch audio to the bedroom. I can use the computer to perform macros. So I can hit one button on a controller in a room and have it turn off the TV, turn out the lights, turn off all the lights in the house, or whatever I want. You can set up ‘lighting and control scenes’ on the computer, so that I can press a button called ‘entertain’, and have it turn on the outside lights, the lights in the art niches, the overhead potts in the living room dimmed to 25%, etc. If the phone rings, the Ocelot can detect that and automatically pause the VCR, turn the volume down, etc. I have an extra module for switch contacts, so that if someone rings the doorbell it’ll turn down the audio and pause electronics and turn the outside lights on.
Now we’re in the process of finishing our basement, and this is what I’m building:

[ul]
[li]Home theater. A dedicated 20 X 12 room, with tiered seating (12" platform for a second row of seats), a proscenium, and a 9’ widescreen theater screen with the image coming from a projector mounted on the ceiling inside an acoustically sealed box. The theater dimensions were designed to minimize standing waves and other acoustic problems, and the room walls are insulated and the interior is double-drywalled for soundproofing. All the electronics are mounted in a 19" steel equipment rack that opens into the mechanical room for easy access. The interior of the room will be treated with acoustic panelling and diffusers and such, to THX specifications.[/li]
[li]13 x 12 home office. I always wanted a nice home office, so now I’m building one. It’s going to have indirect lighting in the ceiling to prevent glare on the monitor, and because it’s a walkout basement it has big windows overlooking our backyard.[/li]
[li]A small sauna. We don’t have bedrooms in the basement, so instead of a tub and shower in the downstairs bathroom we’re installing a 5 x 5 cedar sauna.[/li]
[li]Combination games/family room. The basement has a cutout in the foundation where the fireplace is upstairs. Rather than put in another fireplace, I’m building a TV cabinet that when finished will be flush with the wall, so it looks like the TV is built into the wall. There will be a pool table in the room as well, and a dart board. The basement concrete floor has in-floor radiant heat, and will be covered with ceramic tile. The speakers for the stereo equipment in this room will be built into the walls so there are no cables to trip over or speakers to bang into during parties. This room also has a commercial-grade audio rack built into the wall.[/li][/ul]

This is not a mansion, mind you. It’s a 2600 sq foot 2-story house. And all this didn’t cost all that much, since I did all the design and a lot of the work (all the electrical and lighting and framing).

My advice for the most inexpensive upgrade for a new house is to get better lighting. Standard builder lighting sucks. They put in a few $10 hanging fixtures on the ceiling, and that’s about it. You’d be surprised how much difference a better quality of light can make to the atmosphere in a house. Mount some sconces on the walls, and put them on dimmers. Get some accent lighting over areas where you’re going to put art work. Task lighting where you’ll be reading or playing games. In my last house, the best upgrade I did was to mount a track light over our dart board, and I put low voltage lights in the ceiling along the walls to light up the walls. Cost for all the electrical material was less than $200, and it made the house feel like a completely different place.

73

A sliding roof observatory with a big telescope, like this:

http://www.astromart.com/viewad.asp?cid=267866