Our home inspection is done and we’re turning in our repair requests tomorrow. As of today it’ll be exactly five weeks until we close on the house. Have I mentioned that over a week ago I typed up a 7-week calendar in Word and printed it out? It’s now hanging on our living room wall and each day I mark a big X through that day as we countdown to Closing Day? Yes, I’m that excited.
Things I’m looking forward to:
- Painting CootieGirl’s room a pale shade of pink so that she can have the glorious Princess room she so desires.
- Painting CootieBoy’s room a medium shade of blue so that he can have the glorious Finding Nemo room he so desires.
- Saving up $$ so that I can have built-in bookcases put along one wall in the living room to hold most of my books.
- The White Elephant Party – the attendance may be sparse this year, but we’ll have a lot more room to spread out and a much easier time of making the food!
- Having a two-car garage to park my car in. No more cold car in winter and hot car in summer. No more film of pollen in spring or acorn dents in autumn.
- Having my closet in the same room I sleep in. In the old house my closet was in the guest room while Denis used the master bedroom closets.
- Having a master bathroom en suite. Again, in the old house the main bath was in the hall and I actually used the guest bathroom in the bedroom where my closet was. It’ll be nice to have it all contained in one space.
- No basement. Have I mentioned how much I hated our old basement? It was HORRIBLE. Our new house is on a slab and I know I’ll like that a LOT better.
- Being in a neighborhood that has a playground and a community pool within one long block’s walk. Now, in NJ we had a nearby playground, but the pools at our disposal were the neighbors’ pools. And while I know they didn’t mind us using their pools, it’ll be nice to not feel bad about intruding upon their evening because CootieBoy wants to go swimming.
- Um…this one is a guilty pleasure. We’re gonna end up with THREE Tivo boxes in the new house. I know, that’s crazy right? Well, we’re buying the new tv since we dropped ours when we moved. And since it’s an HD TV Denis wants the DVR to be HD as well, so we’re getting DirecTV’s new HD-DVR which will go with the new tv. The other two boxes will go in the office and the master bedroom, respectively. This is gonna ROCK.
- Having room to actually display some of my Fiesta (whatever isn’t broken, that is), which has been packed away in boxes the past five years.
- Having an actual eating area between the kitchen and the TV room so that we can sit at the table like a real family instead of huddling over the coffee table grabbing bites of food here and there.
- Having a mortgage about 40% less than we were paying in NoNJ and yet having 50% more space.
I’m also going to look into creating a laundry chute between the second floor and the laundry room. The hall closet on the second floor is directly over the laundry room, so if it’s cheap enough I’m going to see if we can eventually have a sealed door between the door floors so we can just dump our clothes down the chute instead of lugging overflowing laundry baskets downstairs once a week. But that’s down the road – around the same time I get those built-in bookcases.
Just out of curiosity, what are the advantages to a slab over a basement? I have always had a basement and wanted one in the summer house we are planning, but the property is too rocky. I’ve been bummed about it but would appreciate your perspective.
Basements flood. Basements can create cold “first floors” on houses. Unfinished basements are gross (that’s more an opinion than a fact).
Slabs are good because they “float” in the land and therefore do not cause flooding in the house. Slabs are good for solar heat in winter because the geothermal temperatures of the ground (which is warm below the frozen surface) go into the convective slab, thus making the house a bit warmer and relaxes your reliance on your heat source.
Using that same idea, basements are warmer than expected in winter because they are keeping all that warm geothermal air for themselves. Thus in winter, houses with basements need to work a bit harder to warm up using conventional methods (fireplaces, heating systems, skylights).
Actually, I’ve owned slab houses and slab floor are colder in the winter than a basement house. The reason is that the ground gets cold and the slab becomes a heat sink that absorbs all the cold and radiates that cold through the floor. In our old house in Fairfax, the only room on a slab was the family room and it was unlivable until we put the wood-burning stove into the fireplace. Then enough heat was driven into the slab to make the floor bearable. But for the first couple of years we would have to put stools in there to sit to watch tv because if you left your feet on the floor they went numb from the cold slab.
Dad – everything I’ve read in researching solar building and construction says that slab is the BEST type of home foundation for convective geothermal heating. It’s possible that the slab room in that house didn’t get significantly warm because it was the ONLY part of the house that was slab and also didn’t have good sunlight during optimum solar hours.
All I know is that when we build, it will be to absolute solar-optimum conditions, and will include a slab foundation with plenty of solar light to increase the convectivity of the floor.
NJSue – if you are building from scratch, I’d also like to recommend doing a radiant slab foundation using a geothermal heat pump. NJ offers a lot of rebates for solar construction and you can probably get 50% of the money back that you spend to install solar products in your new home (solar water heater, solar PV panels for electricity). Add in the radiant slab foundation and you’ll have a cool floor in summer and a warm floor in winter.
Sounds like you to have all your plans in order. The only downside is that we have to travel over 10 hours, each Thursday, this fall to catch an episode of Survivor.
Thanks for the insight– we actually have no choice as the basement would never be able to be dug. The property is in PA– I hope they have similar rebates…
Here is a link to various rebate programs in PA, depending on your location. Installing solar can be expensive, but with the rebates it makes it more managable AND you save money on utilities each month! If you plan on keeping the house 10+ years it definitely makes sense to include solar construction in your PA house.
http://www.dsireusa.org/library/includes/map.cfm?State=PA&CurrentPageId=1&RE=1&EE=0
Just a suggestion: if you make a laundry chute – you should also put in a pulley & lever system to haul your laundry back UP (in a basket), without lugging all those heavy clothes up the stairs! I was planning on doing the exact same thing, but we moved.
Cristan – I don’t mind taking the clothes back upstairs once they are clean, but it’s the dragging the overflowing baskets down the stairs that I hate.
I like Cristan’s idea. Dumb weighter/chute it should be.
We don’t have room for a dumbwaiter just for laundry. We only have room for a small chute for us to throw laundry to the first floor. If the laundry was in a basement then I would consider the dumbwaiter idea because then I’d avoid lugging laundry down/up TWO sets of stairs. But for a single flight, I can handle just having a chute and only having to take laundry upstairs once it’s done.
Delurking for the second time in one post(!) to agree with Denis– we have a chute and it IS handy, but it also becomes the “I don’t wanna wear this shirt after all but I’m too lazy to fold it and put it back in the drawer, so I’ll just throw it down the chute instead” chute. And it will take my kids at least another 3 years to be strong enough to carry laundry baskets up the basement steps, so the lugging is all up to me. They COULD help pull a dumbwaiter up (or press the button for the electric version) though…
I don’t think you need a whole dumbwaiter, I think you could just rig the pulley on the ceiling and raise & lower a basket as needed. (WOW – Dooce never responds to my comments – and you two are the only blogs I read: I’m psyched!)
yeah– and you could rig it up in the closet where you’re planning to put the chute. Cristan and I will figure it all out for you!
Thanks njsue and Cristan. We’ll figure it out together. Pop, you want to get in on this?
*lol* NJSue and Cristan – you two work on a design and let me know what you each come up with for a pulley system that WON’T encourage my kids to climb INTO said pulley system and use the dumbwaiter as a toy.
How’s this for design: THe door to the closet is divided in half, like a dutch door. The bottom, which rises to maybe bellybuttonish height, can be locked and the top part of the door may be opened and clothes dropped in so that they fall down the chute. The kids can even practice tossing their dirty clothes over the top of the bottom section of the door, basketball style. The shelf for the dumbwaiter rises to a area that is accessible by opening the top part of the door. The optimum mechanism would allow you to adjust the height of the shelf. The bottom half of the door could stay locked to ensure the kids don’t joyride either down the chute or on the dumbwaiter, but could be unlocked to retrieve errant clothes or to pull a heavy object from the shelf onto the floor when the dumbwaiter is stopped at floor level.
njsue, I think we have a winner. Pop, Cristan, any thoughts?
wow njsue- that;s pretty advanced engineering! I’m just a lowly graphic designer – plus, the only laundry chute I ever encountered in a “real” home was just a hole cut in the floor of the closet above the washer (definately NOT child friendly – if my 18 month old was in a house with one of those he jump down it every day!)
My idea for my old house was just a hole in the floor of the master closet (with a lock – or maybe like a reverse attic door) so that we could still use the closet, and then hide the trap-door with a rug. Then a simple pulley like this: http://kosmoi.com/Science/Physics/Machines/pulley.gif with ropes tied to a basket which would be the correct size to fit through the hole.
It’s kind of a ghetto-rigged idea!
(By the way, I hope you survive Ernesto ok – we’re in Hilton Head this week, prepared for the worst, but it’s just a normal rainy day.)
I’ve seen the hole-in-the-floor thing and figured that’s sort of what we’d do, with a laundry basket sitting underneath it to catch the clothes. Except since we have 2-zone HVAC in this house we’d have a door on the 2nd floor with rubber seals all around the edges to keep us from losing too much of the 2-zone HVAC efficiency. That’s what my initial thought was when I thought about having a “chute”.
My chute is a bottomless compartment in the vanity of the kids’ bathroom. The “door” pulls open to expose a hole that is above the laundry area in the basement. My husband, who grew up in this house, used to open a basement window, drop down to the basement floor, stand up on a table and shimmy up the hole when he’d locked himself out. (Don’t tell my kids!)This was when he was a stick and weighed close to nothing in middle school.
Fortunately this would have NO access to the outside of the house since the laundry room has no windows and we have no basement. So no skinny kids getting in OR sneaking out using any chute we put in!