Buying A House: C or D?

I hate being able to see everything the moment you walk in. I like a little drama as you walk through, the house revealing itself bit by bit. Plus I want to be able to hear the TV when someone is using the blender (these two things overlap temporally in my house A LOT)

Our answer to this was to have a giant "pocket door" that can slide shut and separate the kitchen from the living room if we want some separation but otherwise stay open

Kitchens in French apartments (maybe houses too?) are generally desired to be separated from the rest of the house, by doors and also by being a little away from the main room. Our new apartment thus has this feature, and yeah, we'd prefer it to be more open to the house b/c yeah cooking should usually be social.

we are presently waiting on our kitchen to be installed as well. the room is there, of course, and it happily came with a sink already installed (not something you can count on) but nothing else. so we contracted cupboards and shelves etc. to be installed, but it takes a few months for them to be built (it's all custom apparently). we could have just bought ikea stuff or gone with craigslist-y things but neither of us is "handy" nor inclined to learn. It just means that we'll have had to use the dining room table for food preparation for 4 months and have dishes and food stuff on bookshelves in the kitchen. it's not bad, it's just weird for this American in Paris.

I like a little drama as you walk through, the house revealing itself bit by bit.

Exactly, it's an introduction. You want to get to know the space gradually, building up familiarity as you get to the heart of the household. Otoh the person who spends the most time in the kitchen, partic w kids to feed, may or may not want to be cut off from everything else in there. (I say "w kids" because if I don't feel like cooking I can just eat Cheetos and wine for dinner, an option I am given to understand does not come standard on the "with kids" model.)

For me the ideal is a kitchen big enough to have the main dining table in there, so it IS social, just not also interfering with the rest of the ground floor i.e. the living room. W/2 (noisy) kids it's important to me to be able to get a little separation sometimes i.e. one kid and me in the kitchen and the other kid and my wife in the living room

Or both kids zonking out watching a movie and my wife and I able to eat dinner without explosions cutting through the salad

I like a big kitchen-diner but prefer if it's cut off from the rest of the house for noise management etc. I've lived in a few terraces where the kitchen has it's own floor and that's ideal imo

We used to go to open houses (the uh, public viewing of a property an agent is trying to sell) and see those weird houses with like eight tiny rooms in the front (a foyer, a large closet, a sitting room, a parlor room, some sort of nook) gradually leading to a giant den in the back. Usually not part of the original structure with different flooring, paneled walls, maybe even a wall unit for A/C, those rooms combined with the others made the house unbalanced.

We've got a two-story house that's pretty open. Our living/dining rooms and kitchen are all pretty much in the same room as are the stairs and upstairs hallway. The bad part is that the interior wall of the master bedroom upstairs faces the empty upper half of the open room downstairs. So what, right? It's empty except for the sound waves that emit from the television and bounce off the other side of that wall. We swear that the volume on the TV can be marginally audible downstairs, but loud as hell upstairs, even though the bed is three times further the distance from it than the couch.

Smell management even more than noise management is what puts me off the open kitchen idea. Totally in favour of other people I visit having them though.

David Lynch is mostly concerned about atmospheric management and declares that kitchens should be in a separate building to the rest of the house

Had this dilemma when we renovated our last flat - had this neat configuration where we intended to put sliding/folding doors across to shut out the kitchen (which also has washing machine, kettle, etc to make noise) from the living room. Never had time to put the doors in before we moved out and now kitchen is on basement level floor next to dining room (no door between them) but on a separate floor from living room/tv etc so all is perfect.

The houses on my block are all 1939-1940 brick colonials, essentially identical in layout when they were built. Some have been renovated more than others, so it's like a little controlled experiment.

The main floor is divided in half by a central staircase. One half is an 18x10 living room, and the other half has a reasonably elegant 10x10 dining room and what is, by contemporary standards, a tiny kitchen (8x10). We've got a door in between the DR and kitchen, and personally I like it that way. But some neighbors with recent remodels have the kitchen/dining area open. Or some have a pass-through kind of deal, often with a breakfast bar.

Most of these houses keep the general layout of the frontmost rooms, and express their differences in the back: mine has the original open porch. Some have enclosed the porch for a mud-room kind of thingy. Others have put an addition that is usually a "family room" or den of the sort that pplains describes: much less formal and very different from the style of the preexisting rooms.

saw this bank-owned place yesterday, true fixer-upper but it's on our current street and we love this location a lot http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1294-Belle-Ave-Lakewood-OH-44107/33494342_zpid/

lots of original wood trim throughout

Smell management even more than noise management is what puts me off the open kitchen idea

Both of them are a nightmare with open kitchens, we deliberately avoided any houses with them when we were buying. Also, shit in your kitchen gets super grimy super quickly, do ou really want that to be the case with all your records/books/artwork/whatever?

i like the idea of a kitchen opening into the dining room. i've seen some cool layouts with a bar and bar stools replacing the wall between kitchen & dining room but i'm not sure about seeing the kitchen immediately when you enter a home

im still kind of terrified to buy a fixer upper but the idea of it being down the street from where we currently rent is appealing, we can monitor progress more easily, we have a place to live until the major things are done.

a bank-owned place though means there is no property disclosure so a lot hinges on an inspection

You'll need a lot of uppers to fix that last one.

yea it seems like it huh

Oh yeah parts of it are nasty. Neat though! Amazing price, right? Depends on the structural integrity, imo, and how resourceful/handy you feel this decade.

i think if it were on any other street i'd say fuck it. but we love this area. we are a block from the major commercial road, a block from a lakefront park. it is also the dead of winter and we've been looking since last spring, inventory is at a bottom and and we're getting impatient.

That house is very similar to what my wife and I bought in terms of style, age, and condition. the thing I'd worry about is your ability to heat it in that climate. Our house gets pretty cold and we're in Oakland CA.

yea all these old houses in our neighborhood that have forced air heating are drafty. the one thing that has been updated in this house is the windows -- they've all been replaced w/ newer, better-sealed windows. but yea i agree. we have some houses though that have the steam radiators w/ a boiler in the basement and those were pretty cozy, one in particular was almost 3000 sq ft but the owners claimed it was only $88 a month to heat

"we have *seen* some houses though"

Windows are a HUGE DEAL for an old house. Not least because ime when you go to put storm windows on, you find out that every single window in your house is a slightly different size (old windows handmade in place, not stock) and you need all custom storms. So if they already replaced those and you like the quality of them, that seems pretty key.

Idk I grew up with forced air and the only problem was that it wasn't built for year-round living and only the 1st floor had heating vents. If the 2nd floor had been heated I'm sure it would have been fine.

Maybe the $88 is averaging the heating bill over 12 months?

http://www.tauntonstore.com/energy-efficiency/build-like-a-pro-insulate-and-weatherize-bruce-harley-070649.html

If you're doing any work on an old house, I can't recommend this book highly enough. One thing it points out is how poor an investment new windows are if the rest of your thermal envelope is leaky.

My house is 108 years old with almost all original windows. I'd LOVE to get new windows throughout, but I've also come to realize there's no external sheathing on any part of the house, so it'll remain drafty until I start there.

Was about to give that website props for its name, because what better example of warm insulation is there than by using a Tauntaun.

meanwhile housing prices are at an all time high since 2011 and the ol' first time (potential) buyer is fucked again! guess I'll be in my apartment with my wife and roommate until I'm 40!

― carthago delenda est (mayor jingleberries), Wednesday, January 25, 2017 11:16 AM (nine minutes ago)

If you're willing to live in the prolapsed asshole of America, my wife and her brother have a house and 16.5 acres they'll sell you for $75k.

This one is pretty - I can almost afford it:

http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/3641-Traynham-Rd_Shaker-Heights_OH_44122_M31643-23399#photo17

Very, very. Love the little French barn doors under the shelves in the dining room.

Bet that little extension room with the TV gets cold as shit though.

How much of a negative would it be for you if the house you were looking at had smokers living there previously? And by previously I mean "10 years ago" -- the people who have lived there for 10 years don't smoke, it was the people before them.

Has the house been painted or cleaned in 10 years? If not, that's a bigger deal than the smoking. Remember that from like the 1930s-1970s, most adults either smoked or tolerated smoking.

Owners of B&Bs will just leave out bowls of vinegar or halved apples, and the smell is gone in a day or two. Am I missing something, or is someone extremely sensitive / allergic? My house was built in 1940 and I'm sure it was smoked in, but can't detect anything. Whatever residue was there has been painted over many times over.

I couldn't smell anything. I assume it's been cleaned, I think at least some of it has been painted. The plaster in the house is all original. But we have kids and my sense is that the tobacco residue is pretty bad for you whether you can smell it or not? I mean, I think the most potent argument is indeed "every single old house has tobacco residue in the walls and wood, it's only a question of whether you actually know about it or not," just trying to get my head around it.

my parents moved our family to a house that had a smoker in it

before we moved in: all carpet removed, all surfaces cleaned and painted

there was still a faint smell if it was humid, but after they replace the kitchen cabinets, that mostly stopped. the wood was porous enough that it soaked up some smoke smell and even refinishing them didn't get rid of that

even after changing every surface, on some days with the right amount of humidity and atmospheric pressure, a faint smell of smoke would bleed through the ceiling because it was trapped in the insulation

How much of a negative would it be for you if the house you were looking at had smokers living there previously? And by previously I mean "10 years ago" -- the people who have lived there for 10 years don't smoke, it was the people before them.

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Tuesday, February 21, 2017 11:33 AM (thirty-four minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

how would you even know this if it had been 10 years?

The current owners told us.

oh ok

we're renting a place right now and the third floor space (a finished attic) was definitely the smoking den of the previous tenant, it smelled very strongly especially since we moved in during the humid summer. i don't notice the smell anymore, i think it's dissipated quite a lot. if i owned the place, i'd paint the walls and throw out the carpeting and i imagine that would make it even better.

in other words it would definitely not be a negative for me if i otherwise loved the house. we have major pet allergies in our family, and we're not even really considering it a problem houses we see had pets in them. we'll just get rid of the carpeting, clean the air ducts, paint the walls, and do major cleaning (all which we would do for any house we see, pets/smokers or not).

there are still butts smoldering on the driveway

ha

Also this place costs substantially more than we'd been thinking of paying (but is also much bigger) -- in a lot of ways it seems worth the stretch but I sort of feel like if we're going to break the bank it shouldn't have ANYTHING that gives me pause.

we'll just get rid of the carpeting, clean the air ducts, paint the walls, and do major cleaning (all which we would do for any house we see, pets/smokers or not).

ha, see, i can't imagine doing any of that (but I think the current owners did when they moved in)

smokers living there 10 years ago would not give me pause in any way

yeah, my anecdote aside, living in that house was fine

but if they didn't replace/paint/clean things thoroughly, it's possible some rooms could still have musty cigarette smell when the weather's off

there are a lot of things that give me pause though. it occurred to me today that we've seen over 20 houses and have been looking for 10 months.

Yeah, us too.

dang man, I think I saw 30 houses in one month, but I was a very motivated buyer

also I wasn't quite sure what neighborhood/house style I wanted and was looking by myself on open house days and going out with a realtor other times -- I'd see four or five in a day with the realtor, but a couple days were a loss because I just wasn't into the area/house on reflection