When my husband and I were shopping for our first house (in Decatur, Georgia, in 1975), we became fluent in the jargon used in newspaper real estate ads: “Charming” (“small”), “Quaint” (“has antiquated wiring and plumbing”), “Handyman Special” (“needs a lot of work”), and of course “Endless Possibilities!” (“Maybe you can make something out of this if you can figure out where to start”).
The phrase that became part of our family vocabulary, however, was “intriguing floor plan.” This could mean that the builder or architect was eccentric, but more often it implied that pragmatic alterations made over the years by a series of owners to suit their personal circumstances had resulted in a very bizarre layout. We have a little of that here: when the previous owners added a new master suite to the back of the house, they ended up converting one of the bedrooms (now my office) to a pass-through not only from front hall/stairs to back stairs/landing but to the new bedroom. Before their renovations, which added a hall, the upstairs bathroom was accessible only through one of the bedrooms. That sort of thing.
I mentioned in my previous post that the slab had been poured for the new house on the site of the vanished “little pink house.” On Friday after his run my husband reported that the first-floor framing was up, and yesterday I got a chance to walk through it. My first impression was that the floor plan might be “intriguing,” but ultimately I decided it was just puzzling in some regards.
I got off on the wrong foot by going in the wrong “door.” There are two double-width openings from the front porch. One of them leads nowhere in particular, and I think this will be a dining room with French doors opening onto the porch. The other, with openings for a coat closet and powder room, was clearly the (very large) foyer. Other rooms were identifiably a living room and a spacious kitchen and breakfast room (with adjacent screened porch). The double garage (behind the house) opens into a back hall that connects with a side entry from the driveway and also provides access to a laundry/utility room and the master suite with the de rigueur ginormous bathroom. Between bedroom and bath is a short passage with a walk-in closet on one side and a sliding-door reach-in closet on the other. I pondered whether these were the typically inequitable His and Hers closets, or perhaps the master and mistress will share the walk-in, and the other will be a linen closet. Time will tell.
What I found puzzling, though, was the dearth of plumbing. Although drains (shower, tub, sink, toilet) had been embedded in the slab, and a gas line indicated the position of the kitchen island, there was no sign of any water supply piping. I can only conclude that, since this will be a two-story house, the plumbing will be brought in between the floors and run down to the first floor and up to the second. Again, I look forward to confirmation of my surmises.
WalkThoughts 