I’m not buying that house – the Subdivision edition

I’ve spent way too much time looking at real estate sites recently. Mostly, I’ve been looking at new construction in subdivisions. Many of these sites show some combination model homes, renderings, and floor plans options.

Now, I’ve hosted Thanksgiving for over a dozen; I’ve thrown parties big and small; we’ve had guests for weeks at a time in a house with a single bathroom; my family are all trade and craftspeople, and I work with architects and engineers. Inevitably, we’ve all thought a lot about what the ideal house design would be and how spaces do and do not work for different occasions and activities. Here’s some of what I want for myself and my loved ones, in no particular order:

• a first-floor guest bedroom with a full, accessible bathroom
• a coat closet near the entry and room for a deacon’s bench or place to pause for a minute
• a screened porch
• some non-bedroom space to retreat to when there are guests being entertained
• a fireplace
• a garage with extra storage space
• a pantry or kitchen-adjacent storage
• a kitchen exhaust fan that vents to the outdoors
• at least one generously-sized, accessible shower, preferably in the master bath
• good layout and flow

It’s that last one that keeps me laughing. Here are the bugs (not features) in housing design and planning that have me hitting the ‘back’ button:

• the stove or wall ovens are right next to exterior doors or right next to the refrigerator
  If you can’t open an oven door without blocking an entrance, or if opening a door – exterior or refrigerator – might hit someone holding a hot, heavy roasting pan or knock someone into contact with a hot stove, that’s a terrible layout.
• the dishwasher/stove/cooktop is directly opposite the sink on a kitchen island or in a galley kitchen layout
  This is (slightly) less about the imminent danger and more about the constant irritation. If you need to ask someone to move every time you want to put a dish in the dishwasher, or if you and your best-beloved can’t cook and wash up at the same time without colliding, that’s a daily, avoidable, annoyance.
• the refrigerator or stove aligns with the center-line of the island
  This one is entirely about my particular tribe and how they behave, your experience may differ. My loved ones? They have a bizarre tendency to hang out at the narrow end of kitchen islands. If that spot is right in front of the refrigerator or stove? We’re going to have an issue. Sadly, moving the appliance to one side or the other is infinitely simpler than changing the behaviors of my people. This isn’t a deal breaker, just a pet peeve born of bitter experience.
• a peninsula or island that defines one ‘wall’ of the kitchen area, which doesn’t have enough overhang to put a couple of stools under it
  A couple of bar stools under an overhanging countertop might not be ideal for a formal dining room, but on a day-to-day basis, if there’s a peninsula or island, it should have space for a friend or two to sit on the far side of it and chat with me while I work. When islands or peninsulas are designed with tops flush to the cabinet base on the dining/family/living room side, it looks unfriendly to me.
• a master bathroom/walk-in-closet where the closet is on the far side of the bathroom, with no outlet
  This baffles me every time I see it. I can’t be the only one who doesn’t want to be interrupted – or interrupt anyone else – during a shower every day. Imagine being trapped in a walk-in-closet while your best-beloved showers, etc.! Either add a door to the closet as an escape route or rearrange the order of the rooms, so you walk through the closet to get to the bathroom.
  
• a bathroom directly off the dining room or eat-in-kitchen area
  Just think about that for a second. 

/Here endeth the rant.

 

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Writers, Writing & Persistent Ideals

Today, I can home from shopping for books for my friends and family for the holidays (there’s a whole rant about what Barnes and Noble has become, with their incomprehensible categorization and their pandering to the willfully stupid among us, but that’s for later), and I found a Susan Sontag bio on the TV. I’ve been aware of Susan Sontag since college, enough to get the joke in Bull Durham, at least, but I’ve never read her work beyond some excerpts in a lit crit course.

I watched it. By the end, I really wanted to read some of Sontag’s work.

But even more, I couldn’t help thinking of my own sense of who writers are – the real writers – the idealized superhuman, sensitive, clever, dedicated souls who are clearly not like me – who really deliver on their promise. I realized that in my mind, the myth of The Writer is alive and well. Writers are still, to me, Susan Sontag, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Parker, Madeleine L’Engle.

Photo by Edward Hausner/New York Times Co./Getty Images)

A writer lives in New York in one of those amazingly cluttered and inspiring apartments with bookshelves everywhere, library ladders, orchids, maybe a cat…you know the kind of place. Or maybe they go to Paris for months at a time, where they drink lots coffee and wine and probably smoke too much, with Moleskine notebooks filled with brilliance. They have sacrosanct writing areas in their homes but can also work at any cafe or diner. They are, in short (too late, I know!), Magic.

I am not Magic. I am working, paying a mortgage, paying student loans, eating poorly, not exercising enough, not calling my parents often enough… I live a life of ‘shoulds’ and ‘oughts’ and finding time to write is just one more.

So is my persistent ideal of the mythic Writer and their life of mystic inspiration and suffering for their art another barrier to me believing I can ever really be a writer, myself? What will it take to debunk that myth?