under construction
DESIGN FOR TIME
Your family will not always be this small, or this large….You will not always be able to fly up and down the stairs carrying groceries, and mattresses, and books and dirty laundry…
You will not need to heat whole floors, when you will be off in a single room for an hour or two, then go to bed…
You need to design for the different times of your life, the different seasons of the year, and even time of day.
Your family changes too!!!..
Not every 20 years….but every few years…
And you just CANNOT MOVE with every change….
Your family will get larger, smaller, older, younger…
Guests stay over on holidays…
or friends need a place to escape…
Good design lets you open up parts of a house, or shut down parts…this means having large French doors, or twin pocket doors, not just a wide open floor.
…because, despite the commercial on TV…
the majority of your life… you do NOT have a huge, expanded family at home!
Oftentimes, it is just one or two at home, grateful for the gift of time…to think rest and nap with 12lb cat or two on you lap as you sleep with a tear and/or a smile…of contentment.
Good design lets you be flexible even IF the weather changes… light changes…seasons change… so you can open all the doors, to light and air, and noise and joy…and expand the living room out to the decks & summer winds blowing IN.
As the seasons change, you can close-off rooms and just heat or cool the 1 or 2 rooms you are in for a few hours..…
Because, unless you are the Holy Spirt, or a ghost…you can only occupy 1 room at a time…
How has all this happened in olden times?….
Houses expanded slowly over decades of thinking…adding on a wing or a roof…slowly.
In New England, tried and true design was copied over and over! because they knew it would work… fireplaces were in the center, then on both ends of a house, dormers opened the attic bedrooms, sunrooms, porches, wings were added…
Today these houses are clustered on hillsides…not identical…but, matching in harmony, like fields of flowers…
Look at the genealogy records of the early 1900’s …a lady with her kids all gone, would have a huge house, she could take in boarders…often times men, that both needed a home a meal, that could help her do the constant repairs an old house needs…see Flexible, and kind, and human.
A good house is flexible… and sometimes even portable…
I may have thought of flex-housing…but this is not an original thought… Google it.. Here is a well written article as a point of reference….more great ideas, than even the great I, could come up with!
Flex housing, can be a luxury… Many people just need housing… I get it. (see the Maslow scale..)
But there are many other people, trying to build a nice house…with all the best intentions, that can incorporate these ideas, into their own so they don’t build mistakes, that are regrated by the next homeowners for the next 50 years.
so often, it is not a matter of MONEY, but THINKING that creates the best design.
