Hi, I am ugly.

While we have seen some really beautiful homes with character, personality, and fine details........ what sometimes really catches my eye is the really bad. Some of the houses we walk into, we immediately want to walk out of them. This is usually the case because of smells. Houses and structures need to have better ventilation for rooms with water sources (bathroom, laundry, kitchen). This is not something to save money. Properly specified and sized equipment and materials can be the difference between selling your project or gutting it (due to mold and mildew issues). Time to talk about, 'hi I am ugly.'

Now, let's focus on this ugly facade. Keep in mind, the facade is the most important aspect of the design because it creates a first impression. In this facade, we see elements from the mission style with its clay tile roof and curves and arches, but this is a stretch. They house has a simple, but very large gabled roof that First off I absolute hate seeing the garage on houses before you see the front door. This house truly lacks any area of focus. While it has lots of little details they are not adding value. As an example let's look at the extra roof and accent around the window to the left of the front door. It breaks up the grouping of windows but doesn't do much else.

Another thing you can't see is there is a lower band of itty bitty blue tile that line the base of 3/4 of this house. It is the kind of tile that you might put in a pool. And to make this even better this house is nearly surrounded by concrete. I only hope that concrete is sloped otherwise it must turn into a pool which might work with that blue tile on the house.

This house got me thinking. Not hiring a professional is like agreeing to wear a potato sack around rather than taking the time to buy clothes and have them tailored if needed to fit you.

Nice purple flower

Today's new home brought me these images. Can you tell what is wrong with this kitchen?

Now, look at image two to see if you guessed correctly. There is a minimum of 3 things wrong with this kitchen. What I find is interesting, is the photographer in each of these houses for sale. Is usually thinking, am I capturing the best view of the kitchen. Well in this photo, I kind of agree. See initially I was totally distracted by the purple flower. PURPLE FLOWER........ Then you start to look at the kitchen and notice a few things. 

The red arrows are pointing out the obvious issues. The purple flower is a distraction to hide many things in this photo. Laundry in your kitchen? How is it possible to cook more than one dish on that stove? You have no room on either side of for work space. What you also don't realize is that the person cooking would now have their back to the people they might be entertaining. While still focusing on the stove, let's look at the vent. The vent was an after thought and it looks that way. The more bends in a vent causing the hood to be less effective. This vent hood I am not familiar with but majority of models need to be a minimum height about the stove and unless they seriously upgraded the fan in this hood; this hood doesn't draw the cooking exhaust out of the kitchen. So it doesn't look good and it also doesn't work. Is this really worth it?  I think more planning took to place in taking this photo than took to place to plan this kitchen. While is has pretty finishes that attracts most people initially, once a person lives in this space they know what doesn't work. Architect have the ability to foresee these issues and plan so that created designs solve problems, not create new ones. 

Struggling with the words on this one

•  What were they thinking? 
• Is this really adding value?
• Was the garage just existing? (it wasn't)
•  Why the square punched out windows?
   

There were a lot more questions than answers. While this design seems to function, it is rated poorly on aesthetics scale. What is most interesting to me is the two concepts that don't blend. You have the dome house, which is a round shape and the very square garage but they round and square have an odd relationship and connection that was not thought out. 

We found this place while house hunting. My husband kept asking me lots of questions. Most of them were:

Tell me what is wrong with the first picture?

Look at the first photo- it was taken from the back view of house that is currently next a house for sale. So this what I found on google maps. Tell me, can you see what is wrong?


Now, maybe it was not so obvious. So I am adding arrows to point to the problem. This image is highlighting how the people involved didn't have a through plan. And only later did they say, how are we going 'x' (I can't give it away yet)? See below

What we see is they have a duct running outside their home to heat or cool the other structure. Keep in mind this is also uninsulated duct. It isn't pretty. It isn't energy efficient. It isn't a lot of things.