But in me haste to do the job, I was too blind to see
That a barrel full of building bricks was heavier than me— Dubliners, The Sick Note
This post is part of a series about building a house that looks and feels traditional in New Hampshire. However, this post can be read by itself.
Designing a New Old Home series, Table of Contents
Beginnings — Why an “old” home, and how we came to buy land
Curiosity — Advice on starting
Research, Sketch, Collect — Essential research for home design
Defining Constraints — What can we do without
The Elements — Heating and cooling and airflow
Materials and Hardware — Making choices
Light — Designing for Light
Mistakes ← You are here
Kitchen ← next
In 2018 we built a 30x38 foot house among some overrun haying fields. Our chief design considerations were to make something that had all the qualities we loved about old houses, while remaining within a fairly limited budget. Here’s what it looks like today:
The black barn in the back is The Goose Palace
This post is a catalog of mistakes and things we wish we did differently.
Mistakes of Design and Budget
If I could go back in time I would have increased our budget by just a few thousand dollars to improve a few more things around the edges. If you are trying to make a truly special place to dwell for decades, the return of spending a little more is worth it.
We couldn’t realistically increase it by much, however, so many of our big decisions really were compromises. Before I get into our mistakes, it is worth mentioning a few things that were not mistakes, but would be mistakes if you were trying to copy a house design like ours, and your budget was larger.
We could not consider many features that would make our house more interesting. There is no complex geometry and little detail. Shutters, a more refined entryway, a back porch, 3rd story dormers, and more interior carpentry (custom millwork, built-ins, etc) would all have been lovely additions.
Distance is a luxury in house design: Quiet places to retreat and seclude yourself, even when a loud party is going on, are exceptionally nice and I would recommend building them into your design if you have the ability. We did not. We had just enough budget to build a 30x38 box. So the design lacks length and distance, and the particular nature of winding-ness that we find very appealing in some grand old houses.
We spent a lot on windows, and love natural light, but I don’t think an intense sunny-ness everywhere is ideal. Because our house geometry is so simple, there are no secluded nooks or shadowy spaces. There are not a lot of places indoors with softer light, or variations in light.
These are (I hope) temporary mistakes. We built our house with the intention of adding on to it later, and we can improve these over time. But if at the start our budget had an extra zero, we might have built something like this or this, rather than our austere design.
Then there are sort-of budget, sort-of design flaws. For example, with no closets and a tiny mudroom and no garage, we predicted that storing bicycles would be annoying and we’d just had to accept this. But we were slightly more surprised to find that that there was no great place to store a vacuum or a baby stroller either! We simply didn’t think of those objects. So our stroller mostly sits in our front hall, and the vacuum floats around from room to room. This is not that bad, but they’re big objects that simply skipped our mind when designing the house. Of course, if we had a bigger mudroom or more space for built-in storage (or a lighter stroller that folded better), it wouldn’t be a problem at all, so these are unlikely to be an issue in other people’s designs.
Easy to Fix if We Thought of It Sooner
It’s important to remember that every decision you do not make is a decision that someone else in the process may “default” for you, and this happens at your peril, or at least your expense.