January 11, 2011

This makes my teeth hurt. Short version: old home gets renovated, then sold. And then... this will bruise your inner aesthete.
posted by polychrome 13 years ago
  • My semi-childhood home (the first one my parents owned, where we moved in the day JFK was assassinated - makes that date too easy to remember - and where I lived until going off to a college dorm in 1973) had a wonderful little sunken porch in the front, pushing the living room back a few feet to make space for a little outdoor living space. The latest Google Street View of the address shows a front makeover filling in the porch, plus an oversized front door. The aerial view shows a lot more expansion - the side yard opposite the driveway is gone and the enclosed-but-tin-roofed back porch is now also fully engulfed by the main structure. We bought the house for $40,000 and sold it in '75 for $140,000, current assessed value $710,000. Whew. But then, next door (pan left) was only one story with a grass lawn when I lived there. Now THAT is an ugly house, IMO.
  • The home in the post is what most of Vancouver BC is looking like these days. 1980-2000 was a time of architectural horror IMHO with plenty of slab sided monster homes built out to the max density. Plus lots of attempts by the city to legislate design backfired. Examples? Bay windows - originally not part of the floorspace calculations - so plenty of old homes had them. Then all of a sudden they are part of the floor space - BANG! no more bay windows. Another example? Because the city reduced how much overhang (eaves) you can have - essentially adding overhang to the floor space calc. This didn't take into account how much rain long overhangs keep off of the siding. Poof! leaking and rain stained exterior walls! Lately tho' home designs have taken on a more retro Craftsman/Arts & Crafts look, with for example, wide eaves more suitable to the high rainfall. So there's hope.
  • *weeps quietly*
  • My parents sold their home a few years ago, and the new owners have converted the garden to some sort of nightmare English cottage style thing. That they had to rip out FSM knows how many fifty year old camellias, roses, birches, wisteria, fruit trees.....
  • *wrings hankie* *More weeping*