What is a Home For?

 

If you are Frank Lloyd Wright you can run a river through your house, but if you are anyone else without a ton of your own money, you are stuck living in a box only slightly different than everyone else's boxes. Creative Commons Wikimedia

I keep asking myself whether we are building our new house for ourselves or the  people that will own it after us. Our choices are constrained by what might help or hurt resale and the limited options inside Menard's lumber store. It made me question what home is actually for. Is it a place to live one's dreams or a bank to gain value for resale? In addition, I wonder whether we are building a home or a shrine to the banality of early twenty-first century suburban design, giving in to things that we generally wouldn't have if we didn't have to worry about attracting a new buyer at some point. Last night we went shopping at the local big box lumber store for appliances and other items for our new house with the builders. The trip had me reflecting on how much we are constrained not by the place we want but by the house that someone buying our home a few years down the road might want. 

The question first came up regarding flooring. My wife and I dislike carpet because it is dirty, dusty, allergenic, and hard to clean. Our first inclination was to go with all-wood floors, even in the bedrooms. Wood would be our preference, but considering those phantom future buyers, we decided to go with carpet in the bedrooms not because of what we might want but what a buyer down the road will expect.

I had already given up our dream of having a yard with very little grass and mostly  garden because a future buyer will be uneasy with anything but grass. Our pursuit of having a little koi pond and Japanese-style garden will have to wait. We could have built the house around a courtyard in a perfect world. Courtyards are rare in the United States, but it is a style that goes back to ancient Roman, Middle Eastern and Asian designs that creates a sheltered oasis in the middle of the house that brings light and air into the center, blurring the line between outside and inside. In a cold, windy North Dakota where the wind keeps us inside more than the cold, a courtyard garden providing shelter would make much more sense than an exposed outer perimeter. Why isn't it done more often?

The next thing we gave in to came with conforming to standard appliances and not the kind we use to live. Most prominent was the stove. Initially, a gas stove was going to be installed standard, but we wanted electric instead because of both cooking preference and indoor air quality with gas stoves. An electric stove is a change we made, and we hope we don't regret it down the road during resale. If we were building a kitchen for the way we live, we would have chosen to install an inset cooktop instead of the oven because we never use a full-sized range. We always use a standalone electric oven that fits the needs of two people. To do that would fit our living situation but might harm resale.

Our next choice was  a giant double-door fridge and freezer. Our fridge is typically primarily empty, while our freezer and chest freezer are bursting. We could live just with a smaller-sized refrigerator and more freezer, but again, anything outside of the narrow parameters of what most people expect is verboten.

The next appliance is a dishwasher, something neither of us ever use. We are both sink washers, so we will have a brand-new dishwasher that will never get used. Again, it is something we will put in as a concession to the subsequent buyers and we will probably hand them a new and unused machine.

Then came the microwave. While we use a microwave, it isn't common since my wife doesn't like them and I use rarely use for reheating. We would do better with a small unit for reheating rather than the giant that gets hung above the stove. Again, something for the subsequent buyers.

While we were picking things out, I asked about a wood stove. I have lived in houses and apartments with these convivial winter companions that are also infallible sources of emergency heat, hot food, and water. In our fractious age, having the woodstove as a backup to everything else in a climate where winter is no joke, along with something fun to fire up and watch the fire on a cold night, would be an excellent addition. Again, as a concession to people who think shit never hits a fan and the white glove-wearing snobs who believe a house is more for looking at than living in, I will forego installing a practical addition that would give me a lot of joy.

There is nothing sustainable about a new anything. A new house is a disaster of new things that contribute negatively and it would be better to overhaul an old house. Even tokens to environmental sustainability like solar panels are using resources that have to be mined from somewhere. Still, something is better than nothing. As I wrote in a previous post, if I were building the house I want, I would install a grey water diversion system that would allow me to use the lightly used water from sinks and showers to water the lawn and trees half the year. In the name of resale and keeping the already high price down, I have set aside any options that would make the home more sustainable. Installing hookups for solar would be another option. It is cheaper to set up the wiring for solar while doing a new build, but since we are throwing everything out, that goes too. One day, solar hookups will likely come standard in new construction.

The most effective sustainability option is to install a ground source heat pump that would allow less reliance on the heating and electric cooling system. It would also tie in nicely with solar, which could run it at least in the sunnier part of the year. Air conditioning is an electric pig and the enemy of solar. My wife and I seldom use an air conditioner, and using windows and blinds strategically makes it easy to get through the summer that way and breath fresh outdoor air. In a perfect world, we would install ground source, but the costs compared to a furnace are astronomical.

Though not a sustainable addition, a steel roof more so because of its potential longevity. It pains me whenever I see a roll-off filled with asphalt shingles headed for a landfill. After a hailstorm last summer, it was a common sight around town. How much landfill space is devoted to such wasteful waste? Irony abounds when we throw away a product that is mostly made of oil in the oilfields of western North Dakota. If I had my choice in a new build, I would install a steel roof that would easily outlive me and outlast the ever more common storms of climate change.
 

 So in the end, whose house is it? Each change we would make above would add to high costs on an already expensive house. It is frustrating to spend more money than I have ever spent on anything and still not be able to get what I want. Had we been offered the choice to build a smaller home on a smaller lot as is possible in other countries, adding more of the above changes and options would be reasonable. The market, the builders, future buyers and brainless American zoning are all conspiring against new homeowners trying to build more sustainably and within their means, while getting the house they really want. Again, the world we want and the world we actually live in are far apart. It is like Burgess Merideth's famous line in the film Grumpy Old Men: "You can wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one gets filled first"

Oh well, I guess.