Love Your House! - Just don't LOVE Your House... (that would be creepy)

Five ways to strengthen your relationship with your house:

1. Pamper.  You ever notice the car guys who spend all their free time cleaning and rubbing their beloved machines.  I am convinced the act of pampering creates a deeper sense of appreciation for the thing we are working on.  This is true for cars, motorcycles, husbands, and houses.  Spend a few more hours one weekend and really give the house a deep clean.  Work on those areas that are easily forgotten.  Clean the underside of the range hood.  Simple Green works great to get out oil and grease build up.  Clean the top of the kitchen cabinets.  Clean the window tracks, sash and sill.  Clean the inside of the light fixture globes.  Clean behind and underneath kitchen appliances.  You can pull out the refrigerator and range, but this goes for the dishwasher too.  Just be careful when moving major appliances not to disrupt the utility connections.
2. Reminisce.  At one point you were ecstatic to move into the new place.  Maybe it was the location.  Perhaps it was the daylight, or the kitchen layout, or the shower in the bathroom.  Maybe it was the sense of freedom, or all the open space.  Think about what it was that you loved about the place and build on those characteristics.  Over time, the excitement may have tarnished, and no doubt you’ve found some things that bother you.  Focusing on what you once loved and accentuate those features.  This will help bring focus and clarity to improvements and repairs as you are able to tackle them.  For example.  Maybe you moved in because you loved the view, but the rest of the living room is dark and the carpet worn, and the new tv doesn’t fit well.  Where do you start first?  Knowing what you loved most can help you decide how to arrange the furniture in that room.  It may help you decide what color to chose for finishes, and it will certainly inform your decision on where to put the tv. 
3. Make long range plans together.  Your house wants to be there for you for years to come.  But it needs attention and it really needs to know what you expect from it.  By making a long range plan, you can get excited about and make preparations for future improvements.  Talk about and study these plans together, and listen to what your house has to say.  You may want to add a new master bedroom suite with a fancy new resort style bathroom.  Or maybe you are thinking that adding a second floor addition would be great.  Your house may be thinking, “But I don’t have enough land to build out, and my foundations aren’t thick enough to carry another story.  What does she want from me?”  If you plan together you might even find a better solution than either of you thought at first.
4. Accessorize.  A new necklace or new pair of shoes can totally change the look of a dress.  The same can work for a room in your home.  Try a new set of pillows, a new comforter, maybe a new slip cover for the couch.  Add splashes of color, or maybe even get really bold and add color to an accent wall.  Wall art and sculptures are a great way to bring life to a space, but my greatest advice here is: don’t just pick something, just because you think it will fit the room.  Pick art that you love, that you will want to be with you for a very long time.  Make it the center of your decoration theme, so that when you see it, it fills your heart and mind with warmth and great memories.  Finding that extra special piece while on vacation is extra cool!  But maybe the perfect piece jumps out at you while you’re walking down the street.  Be open to that possibility.  I fell in love with a painting one day.  It hung in the window of a local gallery.  We looked at each other for what seemed like hours.  I never bought it, and have regretted in ever since.
5. Give it a test.  Sometimes we can learn a lot about each other from a test.  There are some really great ways to learn about your house.  One of these is a post construction HERS type test.  This test is a way of establishing how efficient your house is compared to a standard code compliant new home.  HERS scoring is like golf; the lower the better.  Part of the assessment is a blower door test where a technician forces air into the home and checks for air leaks.  The rater would also review your appliances, heating and cooling systems, establish the overall thermal rating for the home and provide your house with a score.  A good rater can also give you a list of recommended measures to reduce your score.  A great rater will list these measures by SIR (Savings to investment ratio) which will help you understand what your expected energy savings would be based on the cost of the improvement.  You might find that some of the cheapest improvements will give you the highest bang for your buck!  Before you EVER replace windows, you should ALWAYS get a blower door test done!  Maybe your windows are fine, and all you need is a little caulk in the right places!  Your house could be much smarter than you thought, and if not, you have a list of ways that you KNOW will make it smarter.

A Purse Full of Water

There has been a lot of discussion regarding alternative fuels and their integration into single family housing and perhaps you've been involved in some of these discussions.  You've probably seen solar panels at home shows and in magazines.  You may have even seen windmills or wind generators popping up in places.  Do not misunderstand, I think these are awesome technologies.  How cool will it be to be able to have your home generate more energy that it uses!  We could even look to a day when home energy generation rivals home gardening.  Just think, one day you could be monitoring your solar garden while you water your blueberries...  That will be pretty neat.  I just don’t believe that we’re able to fully capitalize on these technologies yet. 

What I hope to impart is how important it is to get ready for the future.  For those of you old enough to remember the flying cars in "Back to the Future," you'll recall that Doc got a hover conversion done on the Delorian.  What we don't have yet is an easy "energy conversion" for our homes.

Let's see if I can explain the boring science in an interesting way that makes some sense....

In many ways, air performs like a liquid.  It flows through holes, transfers energy (especially heat), and creates turbulence when it moves.  Your house is really a big air container, and for our purposes, we'll think of it as a large purse. 

Not many women I know want to carry a purse full of water.  It would do horrible things to the contents, and it would render all personal hygiene products completely useless, but for our example a purse works pretty good.  There is certainly a performance aspect to a purse.  It generally has to perform a task, which is to hold stuff, but very few purses are purchased because they are really good stuff holders.  How many purses are marketed because of their great potential to carry your goldfish with you?

No, purses are purchased more for other reasons.  It may be the cool pockets, the way it is organized inside, its style, its color, the manufacturer, and the degree that the purse will increase one's status.  Some purses are large, others are small.  This too is as much about fashion as it is about function.  I don't see many large carpet bag purses in the dance clubs.  They don't go with club wear.

Now imagine that in the future there are flying cars for public use that run on water.  Anyone can walk up, pick a car and fly off, but you have to bring your own fuel with you.  Everyone would have to carry water with them if they wanted to go somewhere.  Your Gucci purse would need to hold water.  How well do you think it could do that?  What about the large canvas bag.  It will hold water, but not for very long.  The more open the weave of the fabric, the faster the water will pour out. 

Soon enough someone would market plastic zip lock bags to be used as water bladders for purses, but that's not a very elegant solution. Who wants to carry around plastic bags everywhere they go?  Eventually, someone would realize that the best solution would be a new purse that holds water and looks good.  Those would sell for a premium until other designers started to copy their ideas.  Sometime later someone might start a conversion service.  They might take your favorite purse and convert it with a hidden liner and special water proof pockets which keep the water away from the things it might damage.  These conversions would be expensive, but the costs would go down as new methods and technologies are developed to help convert "vintage" purses.  Just like Doc's Delorian, eventually, there might be an easy "conversion" as a way to utilize this new technology.

Right now we have technologies to produce energy at a residential scale, and the costs of these technologies are going down.  Soon enough we'll be able to include energy generation in our homes at reasonable and affordable rates.  How well our existing homes can hold this energy is another question. 

New homes can be designed and constructed to be very energy efficient.  Modifying an existing home to achieve a similar level of performance is more difficult and can be terribly expensive, but there are some very sound strategies you might consider. 

First, make your purse hold water better.  For your house that would mean improving the exterior envelope by increasing the wall and attic insulation values, decreasing infiltration rates, employing reflective surfaces on the roof, and maximizing the performance of your windows and doors.  Remember, that these efforts should be thought of as a total system rather than single elements.  Think of the purse holding water.  Taping up one side will help that part hold water better, but the rest of the purse will still leak. 

Second, look at your consumption.  If you spend more money than you keep in your wallet, it won't matter how big it is.  The same is true with energy production.  If you use more than you can make, the investment of a very expensive solar system may never pay itself back.  Look for key areas of use, decrease plug loads, replace failing appliances with higher efficient models, change to energy saving light fixtures, unplug (or switch) televisions and appliances when not being used.   You may be surprised at how much energy you can save and still not affect your convenience.

Thirdly, look for deeper energy savings in the replacement of key equipment.  Furnaces, water heaters, and air conditioners represent a significant amount of the total energy used in this country.  After you have found ways to use less by improving your purse, you may consider looking at employing more efficient equipment.  The amount of energy saved in converting from an 80% efficient furnace to a 95% furnace could be enough to pay for the change in five years. 

Your Grandmother surely taught you the old saying that "a penny saved is a penny earned."  This is especially true of energy.  Saving energy saves you money, plus it puts you in a really good position for when you are able to grow energy in your garden.  You'll be in a better place to be able to take advantage of that future "hover conversion." 

Planning for the future will help you live better now.

More Potty Talk!

Bathrooms are funny.  Bathroom humor, as sophomoric as it is, is still funny deep down.  I marvel at the lengths people are willing to go to try and make their bathrooms serious and respectable.  Try as you might, bathrooms are still funny.

What do you do with the kid that is so full of personality and unbridled humor, but can't seem to focus on college or studies?  Would it be right to force them into a serious career like a tree doctor or sewage plant operator?  Would they ever be happy? 

Can a bathroom be serious?  Elegant? 

I'm not sure.  I've seen some really fancy bathrooms: gold inlay, murals, travertine floors, personal attendants.  Even with the finest embellishments, someone still goes in there to grunt, poop, and make disgusting noises.  I bet they even look at the results of their efforts before it is flushed in the gold toilet.  It seems to me that the most serious efforts at making a bathroom respectable are the most hilarious.  The juxtaposition is just so wonderful.

What if the innate humor in your bathroom was something to be proud of?  Maybe we would have bathroom comedy clubs.  How cool would it be to have a T.V. show devoted to funny bathrooms!  I'd watch! 

I think a bathroom that talked to you would be awesome.  But it would need a really great voice.  Maybe a Pee Wee Herman voice! 

How cool would it be if your bathroom had a comedy routine.  While you were in the shower shaving your legs it could poke fun at the refrigerator.  "That cold box is one cold hearted bitch!" 

Imagine how cool it would be if your toilet was programmed to make loud explosion noises whenever anyone sat down!  What if the floor was a fortune teller.  When you walk in, first thing in the morning, it might say, "Good morning Dave.  Today a bird will poop on your head and you'll get food poisoning at lunch time..."  I'd appreciate that kind of information.  I think I'd go back to bed, and call in sick...   "Sorry, I won't be in today.  The bathroom floor says I'd have a bad day, so I'm staying in..."

I think we really need to help our bathrooms be more funny.  Then again, I can't imagine anything much more hilarious than sitting naked and cold in a draining bathtub, waiting for the water to get below the edge of the tub door so I can step out.  Forget strip searches and water boarding, sitting naked in a tub while that damn little tub drain mocks you with its small sucking vortex, that is true comedic torture!

The bathroom. A scientific wonder.

Have you ever thought about toilets?  How they work.  What they do.  What they’re made of.  Who, for instance, decided that a toilet seat should be 15” off the ground?  Why is an accessible height toilet taller?  If you have an interest, let me know and I’ll send you some articles to read.

What is fascinating to me is how different cultures respond differently to defecation and the removal of fecal waste.  Pooping and flushing.  We here in America take the approach that if we don’t talk about it or acknowledge it, it doesn’t really exist.  Really, once you’ve been potty trained, do people ever ask you how your last poop was.  It even seems creepy or awkward when the doctor asks you about your last poop.  I thought it amusing the other day when the guys on the radio were shocked to learn that a woman may poop when she’s delivering her child.  Duh.

In Japan, they are much less poop adverse.  In fact, pooping is now as technologically advanced as the smart phone you keep your grocery list on.  Super high tech, self cleaning, integrated heating and air conditioning, multimedia pooping! 

So in planning your bathroom remodel, where do you place the importance of pooping?  Is it an all night library session when you finally have the chance to read the day’s paper (like it is for my Dad)?  Or is it a covert spy operation where all evidence self destructs thirty seconds after initiation?  Do you like to poop in seclusion, where the toilet is so far from civilization that you need a map and compass to get there, or do you like to poop and still be a part of the conversation?  I’ve seen bathrooms with no doors.  How do you feel about that?  Where does pooping fit into your world view?  Should your poop be fueling an ecological revolution, or would you rather it disappeared quietly, never to be heard of again, like a government witness under protection? 

I like the thought of making the bathroom the MOST uncomfortable room in my house.  I think I’d like to line the floor, walls and ceilings with mirrors and bright lights so that when you were in there pooping, you couldn’t escape from yourself pooping.  Then maybe dad wouldn’t spend so much time in there when he visits and my daughters would take shorter showers.

“Help! I don’t love my kitchen and I’m cheating on it with the restaurant down the street!”

We talk about expectations and communication a great deal as designers.  We use drawings, models, color boards, and schedules to try and capture and convey a person’s needs and desires.  Great design can only be achieved through great communication.  So, tell me (better yet, tell yourself) what you expect from your kitchen.

Kitchens are a wonderful challenge.  This one room must be the most flexible space in the house to support the most uses, but it is also the most rigid in its functionality.  This is in part due to the role that food plays in our lives.  Food is entertainment, sustenance, emotional bonding, discourse, service, decadence, guilty pleasure, reward, family, culture, life and love.  The preparation of food is no less complex.  Kitchens are more than just a place to prepare meals.  They play a central role in our lives as social beings. 

As a kid growing up, we would return with my family to my grandmother’s house.   My dad and his brothers would sit up all night in Grandma’s kitchen talking and laughing.  She had a galley kitchen with countertops that faced each other, and this made for great conversation spaces.  The food was always within arm’s reach, and it would fuel their stories long after I fell asleep. 

When I think back on her house, I’m amazed at how inefficient the space was for preparing food.  I would never design a kitchen like that, but it was great for hosting conversations. 

So, what do you want your kitchen to be?  What’s the most important role it should play?  Let’s start there.

Maybe you decided that the kitchen should, first and foremost, be a place for gathering.  (Incidentally, it will be a gathering space whether you decide this is important or not.)  To function as a great gathering space, you need to support that activity.  This means making people comfortable so that they can hang out a while.  Generally, this means seating.  Seating could be countertops, or chairs, or barstools, or benches.  Seating may not even have to be in the “kitchen” as long as it is within visual and verbal connection with the kitchen.  I designed my own house with great countertop seating (a lesson from Grandma’s house).  The kitchen was also completely open to a formal dining space and a breakfast nook.  Guess what.  No one but me ever sat on the counters.  The chairs in the eating areas were far too comfortable and close enough not to bother with climbing onto the countertops. 

If you start with seating and conversation spaces, the rest of the kitchen falls into place more easily.  Preparing food is a process driven activity which is dependent on menu and cooks.  How many people are cooking, and what are they making.  Think about what you like to make and how you would serve it.  Maybe you love to make four course meals with an audience of observers who you feed as you go.  I once designed a kitchen for a woman who loved to pretend that she was a television chef.  We designed it around where the camera would go and where the audience would be seated.  It ended up being one of my favorite kitchens. 

Maybe your idea of cooking is serving up delivery pizza to the soccer team while you make root beer floats and slice carrot sticks.  Seating and countertop space is going to be really important.  Maybe you love to cook fish, but you hate the smell.  What can be done?  What if you love making breakfast, but you hardly ever eat dinner at home?  Do you cook for just two people, or for an army of eleven?  Your menu will decide appliance selection and placement, lighting, sink locations, storage, ventilation, as well as size and layout of the whole kitchen.

Once you have seating and menu figured out, you can focus on décor.  The look of the kitchen really ought to reflect your taste and style.  The kitchen represents a significant part of your home investment, and for that reason, it tends to be a place where home owner’s second guess their own tastes against the unknown considerations of a future buyer.  Poppy cock.  How can you ever know what the next person will want?  You don’t know their values, their tastes, their preferences.  What will they cook?  I don’t know!  Did you marry your husband because you thought he would have good trade in value sometime in the future?  Love your kitchen now and chose the cabinets, colors, and countertops to match your tastes. 

That being said, sometimes it’s helpful to have a good friend you can bounce ideas off of.  “I really like Jim, but he doesn’t have a six pack like Jared?  What do you think?” 

The best thing about a designer is that they can run through lots of options with you faster than you might be able to yourself.  It’s like having a really honest girl friend that made out with the whole football team, and who can tell you all about each player so that you don’t have to spend all the time and effort trying to find out for yourself. 

Fight the Power! Entropy be damned!

Let's talk about organization.  For some of us anal retentive, hyper fastidious, perfectionist type people, the most effective way to bring down our blood pressure is to put things in order.  It's a sickness, I know, and if you are afflicted, I feel your pain.  If I said that I was just a little jealous of you people who can park yourselves in the middle of a mess, and feel good about it, I wouldn't be lying a little.  On the other hand, I do think that as humans we have a strong need to affect the environment we live in.  We are the Agents Against Entropy!

There is a little science geek living in my head who gets excited about the universe and all its wonder.  Perhaps you recall as I do the law of entropy relative to the second law of thermodynamics as famously enunciated by Rudolf Clausius in 1865, who stated that “the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum.”  In other words, the natural state of the universe is to increase in disorder.  Entropy is the measure of disorder in a system (or living room).  I don’t like entropy….  As big and bad as the whole law of thermodynamics may be, I still don’t like it.  And as Americans, if we don’t like a law, our tendency is to break the law in protest! 

So today, embrace your calling in the universe and go organize something!  Be an anti-entropy vigilante!

Ah, but where to start?  The eternal question faced by all human kind when facing what can be an ominous adventure.  The answer?  "It doesn't really matter.  Just start somewhere."

So pick a spot and commit to the path ahead of you.  Where are you standing?  In the living room, kitchen, garage, laundry room?  Survey your situation.  Gather all the information you can.  Be a calm, cool and collected private investigator.  What are the things that are out of place?  Which things bother you the most?  What about all the remote controls that float around the room and get lost?  What about the video game controllers that hang from the console, strewing their umbilical guts across the floor waiting dormant for some unsuspecting person to walk by so they can attack?  What about all the cool kitchen appliances you so proudly bought at William Sonoma, but don't have cabinet or counter space for? Where do you put all those cooking utensils? 

The first step: face your opponent.  Learn their weaknesses.  Strip them of their psychological fear tactics.  They are only things after all. 

Second step: commit to total domination.  Don't fall victim to entropy's first lie: "a little is good enough."  Pushing things around does little to foil entropy's long term effects.  Commit to long term solutions that take big bites out of disorder.  Think about it.  It's the same as when you were a kid.  When your mom begged, pleaded, and finally threatened to beat you if you didn't clean your room, and you stuffed two weeks of dirty and clean laundry under your bed.....  how long did your room stay clean?  As an Agent Against Entropy, you can only be happy when your efforts are successful for more than a few minutes. 

This commitment will drive and motivate you long beyond that first ambitious Saturday morning.  As you commit to dominate your space, you will notice a pattern.  After a flurry of effort on your part, your room will fight back.  Entropy is a strong and powerful force.  DO NOT GIVE UP!  You CAN overcome!  Be aware, slowly but surely, those recently organized controllers, remotes, and utensils will creep back into their comfortable disarray.  If you ignore them or excuse their "cute little habits," Entropy has won.  DO NOT GIVE UP!

Your commitment as an Agent Against Entropy will now motivate you to take more aggressive measures.  You might consider purchasing organizers, storage bins, buckets, and boxes.  And these things will help.  But be warned.  Entropy will not give up.  You may find soon enough, that the organizers, boxes, and bins become dump stations.  Instead of one big mess, you have one big mess stored in lots of little boxes.  Oh, Entropy is a clever adversary!

What to do now?  You could enlist the help of other Entropy Fighters.  An entire league of superheroes is more effective than just Batman alone.  You may find yourself in a place where a little help is warranted.  Don't feel ashamed if you need help.  The smartest and most successful business people in the world were successful not because they could do everything, but because they could enlist others to fight in their cause.  So Superhero, join the League of Justice, and let Aquaman help organize your bathroom! 

"But what if Aquaman doesn't understand what I really want or need?"  Good question, and this leads to an even better point.  As an Agent against Entropy, don't shirk your responsibilities.  Remember the first step?  It was to study your opponent right?  Guess what, Aquaman, even as talented as he is, will never spend as much time in your bathroom as you have.  He will never know, and may never see the space as intimately and completely as you have.  All those hours sitting on the toilet, staring at the floor.  Aquaman will never be able to recreate your investigation efforts. 

Ultimately, it is YOUR quest, YOUR fight, YOUR life's mission.  You need to be involved.  Give Aquaman the tools he needs to succeed.  Guide his efforts, and give him constructive criticism.  Help him be effective.  You might find that his skills don't match the subtleness of your opponent.  If Aquaman gets beat up, send in Supergirl!  Be the master, plan your battles, and do your best to match up your superheros with the tasks at hand. 

Something incredible will happen as you battle long and hard against Entropy.  You will change.  You will become the expert, the victor, the Conqueror.  Your life will be full of peace and calm, and you'll be able to find everything at any time. 

You may only have two shirts and two pairs of underwear, but you will have won!  Entropy be damned!