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There are some new houses being built near me, and I noticed a few things yesterday: 1.) They're pretty close together, and 2.) The have windows in the sides of the houses....and I realized that those windows will either look straight into their next-door neighbor's window if they line up, or at the next-door neighbor's exterior wall if they don't.
I have to admit, I don't get the point here. I have a window on the side of my house, but my house and my next-door neighbor's house are angled a bit away from each other (my house faces slightly northwest, his faces slightly northeast) so my side window only gets part of his porch and driveway, but otherwise gives me a good view of the street. If it directly faced his house, I think that'd drive me crazy enough, and even worse if he had a side window perfectly aligned with mine.
Any thoughts on this? Does anybody have a set up like this?
My old house bedroom window was like this and I rarely opened due to it facing my neighbors bedroom window. It didn't bother me too much since I had 3 other windows we could open but I certainly wouldn't want this in the kitchen since we like to let fresh air in. I grew up in the city and all the apartment windows faced each other with a small alleyway between, you could almost climb out of yours and step into your neighbors room
It is what it is.
If it's your pet peeve keep looking.
Buildable (desirable) land is becoming more and more obscure. And in order to make it more profitable lots are being made smaller in order to accommodate "more" lots. Smaller lots with "big" houses means borrowing a cup of sugar through the window!
Trees and bushes should be planted between the houses for privacy. I have this now, along with houses set at an angle to each other around a circular road. I thought the idea of straight streets with the houses all lined up at right angles wasn't so common anymore, in favor of curved streets and houses set at different angles . Maybe it depends on where you are. Some of the pictures coming out of FL show an awful lot of houses lined up next to each other with very little space in between.
You do want the light and air circulation but is always a dilemma how to treat windows that are too close to the next home.
Had this with two older homes in the city. Used frosted window glass and window treatments that included half shutters with decorative rollup blinds.
In my new build in the suburbs the developer actually took care of it by not having ANY windows on the left side of ALL the homes in that development. I thought this was brilliant that they realized this needed to be addressed. It ended up being in the master bedroom and bath and garage, but it really interfered with air circulation in the summer, pretty hot without the air conditioning on.
I have lived in what we called a "zero lot line" house, where the north (in our case) wall was right on the property line, and had no windows. There was a 7 foot brick wall down the property line from the back corner of the house to the back property line. The front of the house faced west; the east and south sides were into our very small back yard, which had a high board fence all round it. All the other houses down the street were laid out exactly the same way. This layout provides maximum privacy in minimum space, as no one has windows looking directly into anyone else's house or back yard.
Oddly enough, I see many new subdivisions here in the Northeast where instead of using this kind of layout, they simply build standard houses with about 5 feet between them thus abolishing any sort of visual privacy either inside or outside the house. Or, alternately, they build semi-detached blocks, so for the small savings of the cost of one wall, you get to hear every sound your neighbor makes, forever.
I don't understand why the zero lot line layout has not spread over the country, as it seems the best way to make use of a limited lot size without seriously compromising either visual or audible privacy.
Not new. We lived in a 1960s house in California for a while. The houses were lined up a few feet apart. Our kitchen window lined up with their master bedroom window. One day we left the kitchen window open because it was hot outside. Our rather large and loud great Dane heard something he did not like coming from the kitchen window. He put his paws on the sink, and leaned into our kitchen window and started barking wildly into their bedroom window. We returned home two hours later to several messages on our phone. We could not really her what they were saying over the loud barking in the background, but we got the message. We apologized, left the kitchen window closed thereafter and sent them a fruit basket.
What is surprising to me, I see new subdivisions of $800,000 plus homes being built like that. Here $800,000 is a mansion, these are huge huge houses on tiny lots. They are ugly houses, the lots are small and completely leveled/cleared, they are on a busy road and are situated too close to the road. Who buys those things? I guess big square footage numbers in a trendy area is all that matters. It is not like we are short of land. The subdivision I am thinking of has about 400 acres of empty land right next door.
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