day 10: perspective

Over the weekend, we went down to Philadelphia to visit friends from college. Our hosts live in a shingle-style Victorian in Elkins Park, an older suburb just north of the city. We kept commenting how big their house was, and they kept saying "it's really not that big".

This morning we were talking about gardening when it began to dawn on me: it's all about scale. I was thinking about Michael and the tweezer-like precision that he tends our new sprouts; our entire yard is about the size of one their flower beds. Peter (our host) went on to explore a metaphor about size. He said, "You basically want to do the things that beat it into submission with the biggest pay-off for the effort. Gone are the days when I thought I could manage the entire yard with any sort of precision."

When you have a yard that large you paint in much broader strokes. As my father used to say, "A man on a galloping horse will never know the difference".

I then started thinking about up-keep, renovations, and how size plays there as well. I'm skating off into "not so big house" territory by saying this, but the scale of our project allows us to attend to detail in a way we (two part-time people doing almost all the work) couldn't otherwise afford.

I mean, we rip into stuff and gut rooms with little regard, but none of the projects are really that big. At 2500 sqaure feet (including the basement) this house just isn't that expansive. I sometimes wonder what I would do with a bigger house. I think customization would be the first thing to go. Everything would need to be more pre-fab. I guess that's the route to McMansions and what makes them so uniquely sterile. Or you'ld need a vast crew of people to get the work done in any reasonable amount of time (with  deep pockets to match).

What about you other housebloggers out there? What are your thoughts on scale and detail? How do you manage? How do you mitigate? Just curious.

Comments

[ivy]

2500 square feet is pretty big, actually. My little cottages will run about 800 square feet -- and that brings me to the question about perspective and size and cost. One of the problems of building beautiful little houses is that the square foot cost is disproportionate to the cost of big houses.

Part of that is the fixed costs of a bathroom and kitchen -- even little ones have a stove/frig/dishwasher -- and part is the cost of dressing the little houses with the built-ins they need to be easily lived-in. In order for little houses to work they need careful fit and finish. If you are working on a one-off for yourself then your square foot costs will be high -- unless you do the work yourself, as you and Michael have.

It's a balance I think about a great deal these days.

[kingstreetfarm]

Your friend seems like a wise man!
It's a lesson I personally had to learn the hard way, for instance: I spent the first two years of our home ownership insisting that I darn well could maintain our lawn by myself. Finally this summer, with weeds crowding out the grass on all THREE AND A HALF ACRES, I realized I was being a bit too ambitious. I finally gave in and agreed to have someone come in to mow the lawn, so now I can focus solely on our flowerbeds, nascent vegetable garden, and other improvements.
It's the same story inside the house (4300 square feet) but for some reason we implicitly understood from the beginning that we just simply could not do it all, either at once, or by ourselves. It is a lot of ground to cover! We've picked our battles along the way, which is why we have a gorgeous and nearly complete dining room but a hellishly badly laid out kitchen and ancient appliances that barely limp along on a daily basis.
For us, we basically decided that the little interior details ARE important to us, so we're taking it as slowly as we need to in order to fit our budget and our time constraints.