Hodge-Podge Architecture

I haven’t written about houses in a while, yet they are frequently on my mind. Small houses, large houses, cookie-cutter houses; so many choices, but what can I afford? So far, I can’t afford anything yet. My husband and I are still working on saving for a down payment. We’ve made progress, though:

• Paid off $6,000 in credit card debt
• Paid down $1,700 on our line of credit
• Gotten my student loan out of default
• Saved $5,000

Every month we accomplish some small goal towards owning our little house in the valley. While we are hard at work saving for our down payment, we often talk about what we like about the houses in our neighborhood and adjacent neighborhoods. This keeps the objective of our goal in mind and it will hopefully save us some time when we begin searching for homes.

Our current neighborhood, where we rent a house, is compiled of 1950′s mini-ranch style homes. Due to their small size, all hovering around 1,000 square feet, I wouldn’t call these homes ranch-style at all. However, I came across a very old brochure of our neighborhood and that is how the original developers marketed these homes. If I were to redesign their brochures, I would have called them more cape-cod or cottage style homes. Our rental house is basically a large square shape, with 3 smallish bedrooms, 2 teeny-weeny bathrooms, one long living/dining area, and a decent sized square kitchen. In contrast, ranch style homes are frequently more rectangular in shape and long.

Our neighbor, who has been camping in his tent while his rebuilds his house, has decided to disregard the neighborhood architecture and appears to be building a Mediterranean-style mansion that takes up the entire lot. As I have been watching the progress over the last several months, I’m a bit taken aback by his choice in design. When the house is finished, I’m afraid that it will stick out like a sore thumb. This is something I’ve taken into consideration when thinking about what kind of house I would like to purchase. There’s something to be said about consistency within a neighborhood.

I’m not taking about the current cookie-cutter style homes that developers are now building. The ones that have only 4 different models and appear in an AABB pattern within newer communities. I’m talking about slightly older communities that have had time to change color schemes, add on rooms, and have some sort of variation in design (even if it is just a matter of moving the placement of the garage.) These homes don’t seem like duplicates of each other, and there is more detail in the architecture, whether it’s the fake birdhouse-style homes or the added scalloped trim around the porch. Older homes may need more work, but this can mean fixing it up to my liking and adding features I think are important, like a solar-heated water heater.

Here is a snapshot of an older block not far from where I live. You’ll see that the homes have taken on unique changes over the years:

Hopefully by this time next year, I will be reporting back that I own a similar style house.