{"id":2078,"date":"2010-11-13T23:32:29","date_gmt":"2010-11-13T22:32:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/?p=2078"},"modified":"2010-11-13T23:33:40","modified_gmt":"2010-11-13T22:33:40","slug":"remodelling_the_why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2010\/11\/13\/remodelling_the_why\/","title":{"rendered":"Remodelling: the Why"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nAs I&rsquo;ve briefly mentioned, we&rsquo;re remodelling our house. We took the first step already almost two years ago, when we&rsquo;d barely lived here half a year, by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2009\/01\/07\/the_wall\/\">tearing down the wall<\/a> between the kitchen and the living room.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe house was originally built in 1907. Then in 1973 the enterprising taxi driver who owned it at the time built an extension. What he really wanted was a large garage for his taxi firm, and the only way he could get planning permission for that was if it was attached to the house. The old house sits on a hill so he built a garage next to and below it, and joined the two parts by adding one storey on top of the garage, level with the original house.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/House_west.jpg\" \/>\n<\/p>\n<p>\nTo me it looks obvious that the planning and design of the extension was done on a shoestring budget. It is a butt ugly box on the outside, with a weird, impractical floor plan inside. I am pretty sure that no architect was ever involved in the creation of that thing. Whenever someone asks which house is ours, I tell them it&rsquo;s the yellow house on the hill with an ugly, boxy extension.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe north facade of the house is the worst, really showcasing its boxy nature. And just look at the windows: the bathroom window (the small one nearest the old part of the house) is bisected by a pole! That wasn&rsquo;t an error by the builders or a later change, that&rsquo;s the way it looks on the original drawings.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/House_north.jpg\" \/>\n<\/p>\n<p>\nInside we have:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>one nice large well-lit bedroom;<\/li>\n<li>one reasonably large but ugly bathroom;<\/li>\n<li>a weird room reachable only from the bathroom, originally meant as a sauna but never furnished or equipped as one, now used to store stuff and to dry our laundry;<\/li>\n<li>a long useless corridor with lots of built-in wardrobes &ndash; so narrow that we <a href=\"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2009\/03\/31\/the_house_of_disappearing_doors\/\">removed the bathroom door<\/a> because it was blocking the corridor.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>\nOn the floor plan, the old part is to the left, and the extension to the right. (The floor plan doesn&rsquo;t match the current state of affairs to 100% but it&rsquo;s close enough.)\n<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/House_floor_plan.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>\nUgly on the outside, lots of wasted space inside. We&#8217;re going to change that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I&rsquo;ve briefly mentioned, we&rsquo;re remodelling our house. We took the first step already almost two years ago, when we&rsquo;d barely lived here half a year, by tearing down the wall between the kitchen and the living room. The house was originally built in 1907. Then in 1973 the enterprising taxi driver who owned it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[97,675],"class_list":["post-2078","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-house_and_garden","tag-house","tag-remodelling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2078"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2078\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2089,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2078\/revisions\/2089"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}