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I have a split entry house. Upon entering the front door is a landing. The space underneath the landing, the two sets of half stairs and two neighboring closets was completely empty and it was easily 90 square feet of floor space. Only a small portion of it has normal head room though. The space was closed off like a normal room with a full height door but it had absolutely nothing in it. On one side of this massively under-utilized space was a utility closet carved out of the downstairs family room which contained a well pump pressure tank and the electric hot water heater. Both of those items could have easily fit in the space under the landing and stairs. In fact if the original pressure tank was pushed back only two feet it would have been under the landing. Last year I added a central heating system to the house and I moved those items into the area under the stairs. Everything fits nicely: water heater, heating system,duct-work, pressure tank, pipes, etc. and I was able to enlarge the family room. I don't know why the original owner (custom built house) did not utilize that space for utilities. Maybe he just wasn't smart enough to do so.
The only other thing I consider odd, although it is quite common, was that the house was built with a small scuttle hole in a closet for attic access. Last month I had nice insulated pull down attic stairs installed in the hallway and had the scuttle hole sealed off. My philosophy is if you need to go into the attic for an emergency or maintenance issue why make it hard to get in or out of there? Personally I rank functionality or performance well above aesthetics.
I had actually looked at buying a small, 1920s-era house near work, but after viewing it decided it needed too much work and didn't put in a bid. Some flipper had bought it previously and stopped half-way through their makeover, so it didn't show well, and it was difficult to figure out just what their plan had been. The flipper who did buy it fixed a lot of the main issues, so I ended up renting it from him. Still, I'm so glad I didn't buy it because some things were just impossible to fix without a LOT of expensive work.
The kitchen cabinets had been painted by the previous owner with what must have been automotive paint. They were metallic red! My landlord had a lot of important issues to solve, so he decided to leave the cabinets as is. The kitchen was tiny anyway, so it was easier to do some accents in red and make all the appliances silver/stainless. My best friend said my kitchen looked like it was designed by NASCAR.
Structurally, the previous owner had cut a "back door" in what had been bedroom #2. My landlord chose to rent it as a one-bedroom house and call that second room a "storage" room since it was so small that putting a bed in it would block all access to that door. The closet for the master bedroom was about the width of the door (four square feet or so) and the same-sized closet for that "second bedroom" had become a slot for the stacked washer/dryer, so 90% of my clothes ended up on a rolling rack in the spare room. It was really odd, but I didn't need an extra bedroom anyway.
Every window in the house was painted shut and looked to have been painted shut fifty-plus years before. He had installed central air that worked great in summer, but no amount of heating could warm that little house due to the cold air creeping into the poorly-insulated attic. The landlord could not really get up in there to add insulation or seal anything due to the lousy access point (a trap door in the ceiling of the master closet), so I had a $250 electric bill one especially cold month. I doubt there was any insulation in the walls, either, since the house was nearly a hundred years old.
Ironically, the only room in that house that didn't have problems was the bathroom! I'm guessing the landlord spent a majority of his time and money on that room. I was so glad to move out of that place.
My last house had one minor design flaw that irritated me for the entire 13 years I lived there. It had a nice size galley kitchen that was open to a large breakfast room on one side....and had a door at the end of the galley to the formal dining room on the other end. The refrigerator was on one wall next to that door and a pantry was on the opposite wall. the door to the dining room was centered on that wall. Since the pantry jutted out a bit past the cabinets on that side, centering the door pushed it toward the refrigerator. That made a normal refrigerator stick out a few inches into the doorway opening. A counter depth fridge would have solved the problem ($$$$), but simply moving the door a few inches to the other side and it wouldn't have been an issue!
I've had three houses built. Each time I took a huge number of photos during construction as I visited the site daily. You'd be surprised at the silly builder mistakes I caught during construction....like a bathroom with no entrance door!
I can't think of any issues with my current home, so I guess practice really does help
In my parents house the extra headroom for the stairs is in a bedroom closet, it's only a small one door closet, the floor of closet is slanted. I guess it's better than taking up room in that bedroom, it's small, only room for a single bed and small dresser if you want room to walk.
My home, a split level, thermostat is centered on the wall coming upstairs, it could have been over one way 2 ft and I would have been able to hang a nice picture there... It's one of those thy on my lists of things to do someday.
Couldn't think of any until I saw this. We had the same thing in the coat closet, which was at the end of a hall back to the bedrooms. No slope, so it was a great place for shoes.
ISTM that is a long-time building code violation in most areas At least 1 bath must be accessible w/o going thru another room.
Really? I've never heard of such code; and I have seen houses with bathrooms accessible only through bedrooms all over the country. Can you please post a link to this code?
The house I currently live in was built in probably the 60s. I rent. Love the house, except for one thing, which isn’t really a flaw, just not to my liking.
The back of the house has huge windows, and a nice set of windowed French doors leading to the screened in porch. The front of the house, however, has a window in the kitchen, and a small window on the side of the house. A huge blank wall facing front, across the dining room from those French doors.
Absolutely limited view to the front yard and street, unless I go down the hall to the front bedroom, which, oddly enough, has a rather large horizontal front window. There are several other homes in this subdivision that seem to have the same type of setup, so I guess it is either a quirk of the builder/architect or of the era.
The house we own now has many design flaws, though I do think most were brought on by trying to cut corners and costs. We have incredible views, so the trade off was there, though this will not be my forever home,
First is the floor plan. It should be flipped. Right now, anyone who comes to our door has to come up on our upper deck and walk right past the master bedroom (wall of windows to take in the view) and master bath (window there, too) to get to the door which leads into our living room. That really removes a lot of privacy, for sure! Plus, if we are in the living room, we have no idea if someone pulls into the driveway because it's the other end of the house.
Second, the master bedroom has an extra small walk in shower, the doors overlap because the shower is not standard width. Also, they put in a 32" vanity and put the toilet right next to the shower. There is a 3 foot gap between the vanity and the toilet, but you practically have to climb over the toilet to get into the shower. Add in that the door to the bathroom opens in, towards the shower and would hit the toilet until we swapped it out for a round toilet. The only place to mount the toilet paper holder is the wall behind the door. If you used the bathroom and forgot to close the door, you couldn't get to the toilet paper (because the door would literally touch the toilet when you opened or closed it). We removed the holder and got a floor tp rack.
There is no storage space in the house. The bedroom closets are tiny. We had to turn the second bedroom closet into our linen closet because we had no place else to store our linens.
I won't even get into the basement family room, but the bathroom down there is huge. The vanity is 32", way too small for the space it is in. There is a 5x8 area under the stairs in that bathroom that is overall wasted space. We will be putting shelving in there eventually.
Again, the view makes most of these issues less important.
I had a combination laundry room/guest bath on the first floor with the washer and dryer on the left wall and the toilet and vanity on the right wall. Above the washer and dryer was a row of wall-hung cabinets with fixed non-adjustable shelves. Problem was that the shelving spaces were only about 8" high, too low to fit boxes/bottles of detergent, laundry softener, bleach, etc. standing up. Whoever designed it probably said, "Oh, look, I'll add another shelf so that there will be three instead of two. The housewife will be so happy to have extra shelves!" Uh, no. I had to bust out one of the shelves with a big hammer so that I could stand my laundry supplies up in there.
My last house had forced air heating with no ducts to the second floor, just floor registers. (Yes, that's exactly what it sounds like: a hole in the floor that the warm air is supposed to go through.) When we moved in we noticed that the previous owner had carpeted one of the rooms right over the register, so one of the first things we did was to cut a hole in the carpet.
In our current house we found that the switch to the light above the shower was, you guessed it, in the shower. You could literally be standing in the tub taking a shower and switch the light on.
Also in our current house I noticed that the circuit to the stove would trip on Sunday afternoons when I was making dinner. After some investigation I found that the electric cooktop, oven, microwave, washer and electric dryer were all on the same circuit. It might have been a 15 amp, but even at 30 when I was doing the laundry for the week, using the oven, and using one or two burners it was no surprise that I was tripping that circuit.
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