guthrie said:
For example, have you varnished/ painted your woodwork recently?
The trend in the USA is away from exposed wood surfaces in house construction and remodeling. Particularly hardwood floors, we regard them as lovely but quite impractical if you don't have servants. We're really bad about wiping our shoes (or swapping them for slippers) when we enter, so we track in a lot of abrasive grit. Add to that our thoroughly undisciplined children and pets running in and out, and a wood floor needs refinishing at least once a year. Millions of old American houses have hardwood floors that have been covered with sheet linoleum, vinyl tile, or wall-to-wall carpeting, depending on the era in which the job was performed. The newer houses have floors of construction-grade wood that are covered before they're first sold. Our house was custom-built by the original owners and it has hardwood. They were in good condition when we moved in and we immediately covered them with Oriental rugs to keep them that way. The "family room," however, was long-ago covered with carpeting.
Nonetheless, custom-built houses often have hardwood floors. For the first few years the owners rigidly enforce the "no street shoes" rule. Eventually the violations of the rule by children and pets take their toll. Some of those fairly new floors already have tile or carpeting.
Do you prefer wood framed over stone built housing? What's the local type of building down your way?
In California where we live, any type of masonry must be steel-reinforced to withstand earthquakes, so anything built within the last hundred years is wood-frame. Our old house in the Los Angeles area was built in Spanish style, so it had exposed wrought-iron bars instead of wooden beams to triangulate the ceiling. Even the old missions and hotels are being retro-fitted by drilling holes and inserting rebar. In southern California where the weather is mild, stucco is the most common exterior material. On the North Coast where our home is now, there are actual seasons to deal with so wood-shingle siding is more typical.
In Arizona where I lived as a child, concrete blocks were commonly used for quick, cheap construction. With the emphasis on "cheap," they weren't even finished on the inside, so you were looking at a painted block wall that resembled the inside of a Third World prison, complete with bare concrete slab floors. Of course when the bulding boom hit in the 1960s and mass-produced housing tracts sprang up, wooden frames became standard.
Ditto for the East Coast where I'm temporarily working. The older houses are made of bricks but the post-war cookie-cutter houses are wood frame with wood shingles. Lately they've taken to covering them with faux-brick and faux-stone siding, as if they're fooling anybody. There are a number of old stone houses that are considered treasures.
Do you use harling on your walls, or is your climate dry enough not to need it?
First time I've ever seen the word. Few parts of America are quite as damp as the UK. Wallpaper lasts for years here, whereas I understand that in England you have to replace it every year or two. Our exterior walls seem to survive without the treatment you speak of. We live on the edge of a forest so we have quite a bit of trouble with mildew and other types of mold. We can't put a bed or anything right up against the wall or it gets moldy. Our hanging art has rubber blocks to keep it from touching the walls and being destroyed.
In the UK, a lot of houses have the bedrooms on the first floor, living area on the ground, why is this?
It took me a minute to figure that out, since over here the "first floor"
is the ground floor. I think that's a fairly universal floor plan, at least in Western countries. You want your guests to walk in the front door and immediately be in the public areas, rather than catching a glimpse into your bedroom, study, office, and other private rooms along the way. Furthermore, as you get older you need to limit your stair-climbing. Going up once for bed and down once for breakfast is manageable for all but the most severely arthritic knees. Having to go up and down every time you go outside or into the workshop is something many people simply can't do. My wife and I both have really bad knees. (In the 1950s American schoolchildren were forced to perform "deep knee bends" as exercise so there's a whole generation of us who now can't even do the "shallow" variety.) Seven years ago we passed up a lovely two-story house in favor of the rambling one we now own. If we had bought it, today we'd be taking bids on installing an elevator.
