peanut posted:

Why is everyone obsessed with resale value? Doesn't anyone have family houses/forever home?

Southern Heel posted:

OK guys, thank you for your help and advice. PM'ed a couple.


I would actually enjoy taking some time to design out the place myself - I'm conscious of decisions I have to make now, which are going to have big knock-on effects that I feel like I have to be relatively certain going into it. If I could possibly call on some advice for the thread on these structural alterations (assuming building code, safety, etc. is all met - purely from a functional perspective) then I feel as though I can take my time learning and changing myself over time. Any help on the below would be greatly appreciated. EDIT: I appreciate this is less around design, but I feel like having a solid foundation will allow me to ask 'rattan or hemp' at a later date much more freely!

The requirements are in order of preference:
- Create a kitchen diner by opening up the space in the kitchen
- Add an additional bedroom/office to increase resale value in future
- Find a way to move utilities away from the kitchen-diner
- Add a downstairs bathroom

This is the current plan:


My wife would like to ensure there's space for another bedroom, which leads to this rather simple change where we rebuild the non-load bearing wall between the kitchen and dining areas in the original plan before selling up, and putting an RSJ across the kitchen span instead of those arches to make space to place the dining table there. Cabinets for utilities would have to reside against the south-east wall over from the dining table. Structurally this seems the simplest and most direct way - but I'm wary of carving into living space to create another bedroom.


Possibly long term she would like to have the utilities in a separate room, and a downstairs bathroom, so expanded to something like this. I can't help but feel this is a bridge too far - ten times the cost of the intermediate step and only gaining a small footprint. It would be a brand new room (possibly better used as another bedroom? roughly 3m x 3m square) but the cost would likely match any increase in value so seems a zero-sum opportunity either way:


The loft is finished, but only has a 6' apex and as such isn't suitable as a real room - based on conversation with residents and local planning officials it's going to be impossible to get planning permission to heighten the roofline, and adding regular stairs (even space savers) to get there is going to require the removal of the upstairs toilet.

Drape Culture posted:

For any UK goon, I hear rumor from several consignment shops that mid-century stuff is not at all popular over there. Is this true?

learnincurve posted:

3 bed semi in a commuter town is my actual final destination. On the one hand, house smol. On the other, I don't give a flying gently caress about what other people think of my turquoise sofa and vinyl floors.

Saying that 3/4 of the walls in every room of the house are still magnolia or a fresh layer of that wallpaper you paint over, because I have yet to decide which colours to match up with my accent wallpaper.

Facebook Aunt posted:

That seems like a really strange place to have a bedroom. Right in the middle of everything is going to be the noisiest part of the house. I suppose it being a bad bedroom doesn't matter if you don't plant to use it as a bedroom and just want to be able to tick an extra bedroom on future real estate listings.

Southern Heel posted:

Any initial impressions would be greatly recieved. I'm working up my own ideas as we speak, to be posted once I have them organised coherently - broadly I'm thinking to repaint into some cool colours to counter all the brown wood. The kitchen I'm really unsure about where to start - what is there is very high quality, but just so OTT woody I'm not sure how to fix it.

peanut posted:

Why is everyone obsessed with resale value? Doesn't anyone have family houses/forever home?

peanut posted:

Your house looks lovely in those pictures.
We have light wood floors that contrast nicely against our cherry wood furniture and medium doors and trim. Lots of wood is great and I like it even more in large grain and varied shades.
Don't chop up the LDK space. People always gather around a kitchen.

Our custom build forever home is 1300 sqf 4bd 1.5 bath, lol?! I minimized hallway space and maximized storage.
Assuming young people will only be poorer in the future, maybe reasonable cozy houses in a decent neighborhood are better for long-term resale value​?

peanut posted:

oh no I gis'd "jesus painting chair" then "time out chair"

Southern Heel posted:

Allen Wren posted:

for real, I've never met anyone who knows how to play it, it's a game you find in a closet and no one knows how it got there

if it's good, I'd be willing to give it a shot, but I think the last time I was in the same room as a copy of it, I was like ten

Drape Culture posted:

This is a great room divider! Any idea who made/designed it?

For any UK goon, I hear rumor from several consignment shops that mid-century stuff is not at all popular over there. Is this true?

Youth Decay posted:

This house was "freshly painted" this year so they took new photos for their new listing (and bumped the price up $15k, naturally). But the realtor got lazy and didn't actually do any staging this time. Wouldn't the "before" photos sell the house much better?

cheese eats mouse posted:

I'm amazed MCM wouldn't have some grab over there. The furniture is tiny it would fit in those houses!

Jaded Burnout posted:

It did. It fit in our grandparents' houses. Now we make slightly bigger houses and buy better furniture.

Personally I need furniture to be both practical and good looking to consider it "good", and MCM fails on both counts for me.

I understand that some people like the look and that's fine, but even if I did I'd fail it on account of my abiding memories of that style of furniture as thin, weak materials without a lot of thought to e.g. how well a door slides or closes. I also hate concrete brutalist architecture so there's a theme here.

cakesmith handyman posted:

Correct, the local shops I go to regularly won't accept it because they can't shift it. Sadly I think most of it gets sent to the tip unless it's a brand like g-plan, then it gets ebayed for thousands (and often doesn't sell, I've seen the same units go up for sale repeatedly for over a year occasionally)

Jaded Burnout posted:

A bunch of that stuff wound up on a builder bonfire in my garden the other month, if that helps set the tone.

peanut posted:

Why is everyone obsessed with resale value? Doesn't anyone have family houses/forever home?

The Bloop posted:

It's just like playing rummy with cards except you use tiles (and have a bigger hand) where you make runs and sets etc - but the goal is simply to go out, sets you play aren't "yours" for points or anything.

The real difference is that you can alter any set out there as long as it stays legal. Like if someone played 7.8.9 and you needed the 9 for something, you could play a six and then take the nine since the remaining 6.7.8 is still legal. It also has two wild tiles that can be swapped out in the same way.

It's a fun take on rummy.

maybe but whatever. If you don't like it we'll play cribbage instead.

Jaded Burnout posted:

It did. It fit in our grandparents' houses. Now we make slightly bigger houses and buy better furniture.

Personally I need furniture to be both practical and good looking to consider it "good", and MCM fails on both counts for me.

I understand that some people like the look and that's fine, but even if I did I'd fail it on account of my abiding memories of that style of furniture as thin, weak materials without a lot of thought to e.g. how well a door slides or closes. I also hate concrete brutalist architecture so there's a theme here.

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

That's like announcing you hate t-shirts because the one you bought at H&M ripped. Cheap crap is going to be cheap crap. People aren't collecting the lovely MCM furniture - if it lasted this long it's because it was well-made.

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

That's like announcing you hate t-shirts because the one you bought at H&M ripped. Cheap crap is going to be cheap crap. People aren't collecting the lovely MCM furniture - if it lasted this long it's because it was well-made.

learnincurve posted:

The problem is that the well made stuff never existed in anywhere like the same quantities in the U.K. as it did in America. Furniture of that period has the same style, but it was mass produced in old aircraft factories out of plywood and veneer to replace furniture that had burnt up in the blitz. It lasted a long time because plywood is actually quite sturdy and people's Nans take care of their furniture. I honestly think you would struggle to get a full good quality MCM set of furniture in the UK at any price, the only people who could have afforded it at the time will have got rid of if it in the 1960s and they would have just thrown it away.

Jaded Burnout posted:

It's more that the style necessitates it. Thin legs, thin veneer doors, no runners or soft stops etc. It's more likely that I have different standards to what I consider practical. I would not feel comfortable putting my feet up on an MCM table, or knocking into a leg while moving a chair, or doing many of the incidental things life does to furniture, no matter how well made they are.

learnincurve posted:

The problem is that the well made stuff never existed in anywhere like the same quantities in the U.K. as it did in America. Furniture of that period has the same style, but it was mass produced in old aircraft factories out of plywood and veneer to replace furniture that had burnt up in the blitz. It lasted a long time because plywood is actually quite sturdy and people's Nans take care of their furniture. I honestly think you would struggle to get a full good quality MCM set of furniture in the UK at any price, the only people who could have afforded it at the time will have got rid of if it in the 1960s and they would have just thrown it away.

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

I do those things to my MCM furniture all the time. It's wood, it's fine. Again, the good stuff isn't made of "thin veneer." It's made of wood. You know trees? Those, but in rectangle form.

Jaded Burnout posted:

No you're right, nobody's ever made weak furniture out of wood.

But I'm glad you have solid furniture that you like the look of, every piece I've dealt with has felt cheap and even if it didn't I still don't like the way it looks.

I don't think it's worthwhile distinguishing between "all MCM furniture" and "all MCM furniture I have seen or am ever likely to see". There's no useful difference from where I'm sat.

learnincurve posted:

It took a long long time for a large part the general population to see anything but basic and functional as something other than "wasteful". War, general strikes, recession, makes it the mid 1990s when we actually fully recovered and started to come in line with America.

Did you know....

In the 1970s we saw the rise of brown, Avocado, green, mustard and orange in design. This happened because those were the basic colours Rover used on their cars. The heavily unionised factory workers in brum simply walked into the store rooms, stole the paint and decorated their houses with it. For some ungodly reason that palette ended up spreading across the world, and all because Kevin wanted some free paint for his mam's house.

Tiny Brontosaurus posted:

Oh I'm sure there's a long, long list of things you don't think are worthwhile.

Southern Heel posted:

Any initial impressions would be greatly recieved. I'm working up my own ideas as we speak, to be posted once I have them organised coherently - broadly I'm thinking to repaint into some cool colours to counter all the brown wood. The kitchen I'm really unsure about where to start - what is there is very high quality, but just so OTT woody I'm not sure how to fix it.

Southern Heel posted:

Aw thanks buddy Wife and I really liked it, even though it needs a bit of modernising IMO. I'm really not a fan of the green walls - doing some quick colour swatches in Photoshop however, I'm not sure what WOULD work. Not chopping up LDK, because the K is already separate. I'm thinking of making the K bigger by bashing thru that arched wall - but then not entirely sure what I'd do with the space I've gained in the LD area if I'm not going to use it for a dining table!

Youth Decay posted:

in conclusion, Ohio is cheap

Facebook Aunt posted:

SA has ruined me. I can no longer look at a sunken tub without worrying about the state of the joists. :ohdea:

Youth Decay posted:

Bad Munki posted:

This is literally Cameron's father's house from Ferris Bueller, right? I'm not going crazy?