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January 28, 2008
To Biggie-Size or Not Biggie-Size Your Home
Austin imposed a moratorium on "McMansions" while we were in the midst of renovating (and super-sizing) Erwin House. In the spring of 2006, our city council unanimously voted in favor of certain restrictions which would limit the size of residential developments in single-family neighborhoods.
Although David and I agreed with the intent of the rule (to prevent house flippers and other developers from outrageously maxing out the buildable square footage of a small urban lot), we were very disappointed with the lack of due process.
A couple of days ago, a former Austin resident left us this comment:
"The question that doesn't seem to get discussed much around this issue is how big does a house really have to be for a modest family? In the U.S., I think our first answer is always "as big as I want it and can afford!" . . . [H]ow is it that 40 years ago, many of the same houses being demolished in Crestview to make a 3 story, 2800 sq' mod box for 4 people probably were used to raise families of 6 or more?"
I ask myself the same question ALL the time. We're raising a family of five (plus a dog and a cat) in 2100sf. It feels exactly right, sometimes even a bit generous. We probably could do without 200 of those square feet, but we've also talked about expanding the family at some point... Why did it seem so impossibly to raise our five-person family in 830 square feet?
I have talked to people who grew up in our neighborhood, families of four, five or six in 800 square feet, adults in one bedroom and all of the children in the other, all of them squeezed around a tiny kitchen table to eat breakfast or dinner. Where did they put all their stuff?
My mother-in-law and others I know have explained that they didn't have a lot of stuff growing up. They had two outfits, one for school/church, and one for play. Their clothes were washed in the sink daily. They didn't have many toys, and they ate many of the same meals over and over again, mothers shopping for fresh food at the market daily rather than stockpiling in the cabinets.
Call me shallow: this all sounds very spartan, like something I half admire and half fear. The people I've talked to don't look back on these times fondly. They remember feeling poor and being constantly hungry. They resented the lack of privacy. My mother-in-law explained that they didn't really choose to live in a small house, they had to. They weren't trying to be environmentally conscious, most people simply couldn't afford a larger home. And many parents who had grown up during the depression were afraid to purchase a larger home, one they might not be able to afford were the market to suddenly crash again.
We started with a drawing for a 3,600sf home and whittled it down to 2,100, partly because we realized that we had originally drawn a bedroom the size of an airplane hangar (things look smaller on paper, I swear!) and partly because we simply couldn't afford to build that big.
What is too big? What is not big enough? Are today's standards gluttonous, or were yesterday's homes too tight?
Posted by Christiane at 02:28 PM | Comments (7)
January 20, 2008
Battle of the Baking Goods
I love to cook, no lie. I don't feel like I get to enjoy it as much as I used to since I'm working so much lately (and coming home exhausted), but when I can I try to have fun in the kitchen.
Over the years, I have slowly been upgrading my arsenal of cooking tools. It started with the array of colorful silicone spatulas (don't laugh at me, but aren't they fun?!). Then it moved on to plain-jane restaurant grade serving bowls. The black plates from Salvation Army are still around, on the other hand.
When we moved into Erwin House, I desperately needed a great dutch oven. I'd been eyeing the La Crueset line at Whole Foods for years, but I didn't feel ready to shell out the $100+ for one of their cast iron pots, so I picked up the $60 version at IKEA. That still felt like a HUGE chunk of pocket change, but it has produced some fine meals, let me tell you what.
About a month ago, David finally tossed our nasty little fry pan, Teflon flakes and all, into the garbage. We bought a Le Creuset 10-1/4" iron-handled skillet
I can't say I yet see a difference in the quality of the materials between the La Creuset and IKEA products. I've been trying to figure out what the socially responsible thing to do is. Are the IKEA products being made in sweatshops? Is the enamel hazardous to my health? How come it was half the price--is it just the branding?
One thing I learned the hard way when we were remodeling: you get what you pay for. I can't tell you how many times I wished we had bought up and swallowed the cost. Certainly I feel that way about the doors we make. I'm trying to figure out how to drive our prices down, but the fact is that our doors aren't made in China by 12-year-old boys, the pieces and parts are made in Florida, in San Antonio, in Houston, and even right here locally in Austin. I want to feel as good about buying stuff as I do about what we make, but sometimes it all feels very overwhelming. If nothing else, at least the fresh produce we eat is local!
I will tell you one thing, though, I support well-made stuff. The fact is that we live in a disposable world and it's killing us. The La Crueset skillet will probably be around longer than I will.
Posted by Christiane at 12:50 PM | Comments (2)
January 14, 2008
IKEA Kitchens, Part 3: Installing Your IKEA Kitchen
This four-part series discusses, diary-style, our experience with researching, measuring, purchasing, installing, and using an IKEA kitchen system with IKEA fixtures, Wilsonart Laminate countertops, Frigidaire appliances, and Rejuvenation hardware. Part 1 details the experience we had using IKEA's downloadable kitchen designer. Part 2 will talk more about the purchase process and how to be prepared for delivery and installation. In Part 3, we will tell you the nitty-gritty details of our installation fiascos. And in Part 4, we will walk you through our kitchen one year after we installed and moved in to discuss how it is holding up.
In the previous installment, I talked a bit about purchasing our IKEA kitchen cabinetry, and in the first installment, I had discussed designing the kitchen using IKEA's products. When all is said and purchased, most of the dirty work is obviously still not done. I don't consider David or myself to be do-it-yourselfers. We needed to pinch some pennies, however, and assembly didn't seem like it should be too hard.
Our experience installing our kitchen cabinets from IKEA in many ways wasn't your typical experience. We had gone through pain-staking steps to make sure that the items we ordered were all accounted for. This can be difficult to do when you take one look at your receipt and realize that all of the pieces and parts are in a foreign language. Our sales rep advised us to spend time organizing the parts upon arrival.
First things first, make sure that you have the room to set about organizing and assembling the cabinets. For those of you who are living in your remodel, be prepared to give up your dining or living room as well as your kitchen as you do the pre-installation prep. As you can see, the cabinets before organization took up most of our living room.
Again, I need to emphasize the importance of checking and double-checking the inventory list with a sales rep before you leave the IKEA showroom. It is easy to leave without a cabinet door or two on the list, and because the wait time for receiving your product can be weeks or even months depending on the popularity of your choice, it is worth those ten minutes of anal retentiveness.
We were very lucky to have chatted a wee bit with Caro about her experience. She and her husband also did a self-install of their cabinets and had also learned the hard way about pre-organizing. As a result, when the cabinets arrived on a big palatte, David knew to put everything in piles according to the numbers on the receipt (on which the sales rep had handwritten notes for us in english regarding what was what). After organizing, things were much more manageable.
David had scheduled to take a week off of work to do the install figuring that organzing and measuring would take the most amount of time, and that the installation would then move along smoothly. I think this would have been the natural order of things, except that our house was broken into the night before he was ready to start installing. David's piles remained when he arrived the next morning, but the receipt, instructions and warranty had been stolen leaving him completely clueless as to what to do with all of the pieces and parts.
Again, we were lucky to have Caro in town. She offered to let us borrow her instructions. IKEA was able to send us a copy of our receipt a few days later, but the handwritten notes our sales rep had made were not on it, leaving David to decipher the Swedish code.
By this time, David's week was half over. In a fit of desperation, we started looking for a professional to help us with the install. We installation how-to video over at IKEAfans.com to brush up. When my bio-dad came to visit after the birth of our youngest daughter, he and David set to work. Amazingly, they had the entire thing finished in two 12-hour days.
Our Flickr photos tagged with "ikeakitchen".
In the last installment, I'll talk a little more about living with an IKEA kitchen: thumbs up or down?
See also:
Kitchens, Part 1: Purchasing Your IKEA Kitchen
IKEA Kitchens, Part 2: Purchasing Your IKEA Kitchen
Posted by Christiane at 11:23 AM | Comments (2)