goodbye, Milky Way

The sign goes up on our house tomorrow. We spent an exhausting day yesterday doing all the final work to get it ready, and the cleaners come in today. (Actually, by my standards, it’s not quite ready for new tenants. On the other hand, cleaning behind the fridge may not be practical when we’re leaving it there. Oh, and I should tell the oven to clean itself, too.)

It’s been a comfortable house to live in. I used to believe that design mattered more in small houses, whereas in large ones it was less important because there’s room for slop, but I’m not so sure now. Certainly, fit and finish and plenty of storage are crucial in tiny houses. On the other hand, there are a lot of design features in this house that I wasn’t even aware of until I read about some principles (in one of the Not-So-Big House books). For one thing, the formal living room is open to the dining room and the entrace hall, and the family room is open to the kitchen and breakfast area, but no two touching rooms have both the same ceiling height and the same floor height. The living room and foyer have a vaulted ceiling, but the foyer is up a couple of steps. The dining room has the same level floor, but a normal flat ceiling. The kitchen has a lowered ceiling that steps up a foot in the breakfast area, then the ceiling stays there but you go down two steps in entering the family room. The hall off the family room has a lower ceiling again. So every room is defined enough to have a sense of place and it doesn’t feel like a cavern.

The downstairs bedroom / den has double doors that close so you can sleep or get work done in peace – I’ve seen offices set off only by an arch. The front doorway is up a few steps and then sheltered, so there’s that sense of welcome. All three external doors have some sort of shelter – the front not-quite-a-porch, the back covered patio, the garage – to buffer the outside heat.

Then there are the features that were part of our decision to buy the house. The tile floor in the whole downstairs was part of that – cool and easy to clean, grayish white to reflect white but textured and speckled so every bit of schmutz doesn’t show. The vaulted ceiling in the living room is stained a dark wood color, so the ceiling doesn’t seem too distant. And there are a few things we added, like the programmable thermostats and the area rugs that further define area and keep the color scheme from being too uniformly white. There are places to escape, when you want to be alone, and places to be together. The backyard has a pool – I think humans just like to be around water. Or at least I do. Even though we don’t actually get in the pool all that much, we’re in the backyard much more than in our previous house where it was all grass. We also put in a gas grill that we’ve used far more than we expected, and a firepit area that we haven’t used all that much, but that’s been responsible for some good memories when we did.

One of my favorite rooms is the downstairs 3/4 bath. It used to look like it came from another house – probably one belonging to the Addams family. It still looks like it comes from another house, but it it would be from one nicer than ours. Rudder took it apart down to the studs and made it a thing of beauty. (I did the paint and put in the light fixture, but he did the hard parts. When he had it all apart, he punched through a hole in the back of the hall closet which backs on to that bath, then covered it over with a nice little cabinet door to create a little storage area. If I were a good bit smaller, I’d proclaim it my clubhouse and hide in there.

We’ll miss it when we leave. A couple of my old entries have some pictures of the house and of the backyard. The furniture has been moved around a bit and it’s all considerably cleaner, and the landscapers we hired have cleared out a lot of the brushy area behind the basketball court, but this gives you an idea of what it looks like.

Also, I liked the address.
Goodbye, house. I’ll miss living on Milky Way.