Lesbian Flower 🌺

Earthship home with cute sunflowers outside.

Pink house in Chatan, Okinawa, Japan. 2014

by whatstacydid

“I want the inside of this house to feel modern, bright and new!” then why the fuck did you buy a vintage, dark and old house in pristine condition?????

there are tons and tons of hideous McMansions from the housing bubble that you can do that shit to but you choose to butcher a 150 year old masterpiece?

HERE'S THE OTHER THING

I've heard people say "well, old houses are the only houses in my area, so you have to buy them regardless of the architecture style you like! and anyway, preservation costs a lot of money so this is a privileged take!"

that is, honestly, horseshit

I live in an area with Majority Old Houses. a lot of them were already gutted in the 1950s or whatever, which disqualifies them from people being annoyed the way OP and I are. it is not a situation where you have to buy a pristine Victorian or nothing, and I'd be willing to bet that's the situation in most old-house-intensive places worldwide at this point

preservation DOES cost a lot of money! that's true! you know what else costs a lot of money, though?

turning a Second Empire home into a fucking IKEA showroom

knocking down walls, ripping out decorative plasterwork that wasn't in the way of anything but your HGTV dreams, and installing recessed lighting ain't cheap. the supplies you use may be cheaper but the labor is not, I suspect

if you have the money to do that, no, I will not consider you Tragically Forced By Economic Circumstance to rip up the interior of a gorgeous old house. sorry not sorry

get it pre-gutted or get a McMansion. or deal with the fact that I think you're an asshole who deserves to step on a Lego every day for the rest of your life

Nicola Stegmann

Here’s the thing: imagine if we fixed the housing market, so that the price of housing only increased to match inflation. That would be great, right? Except, homeowners typically spend $2000-$10000 per year on maintenance. So homeownership would go from an investment to an endless money pit, just like renting. The idea of a house as an investment, a house as a way to build wealth, requires that housing prices increase faster than inflation forever, which means that the burden of housing costs on working people must keep increasing forever, and the number of homeless people must keep increasing forever.

The housing crisis isn’t just a result of greedy landlords and investors. It’s an inevitable result of social policies that encourage people to treat their houses as in investment. Because once a homeowner internalizes the idea that their financial future depends on housing prices going up, they start favoring policies (such as NIMBYism) that make housing prices go up.

Conversely, if we want to end homelessness for good, we need to accept that housing is someone we’ll all have to continuously pour resources into, because buildings are complex physical objects that break a lot.

The reason I say this is because every time I read an article about the housing crisis, they always say something along the lines of “The housing crisis has robbed people of the opportunity to build wealth via homeownership!” without acknowledging that the housing crisis is what created the opportunity to build wealth via homeownership

What gets me is that “this is not an asset, it will not increase in value, do not expect it to or base any plans on that happening” is what we already say to people who are buying cars (or bikes or other personal transport). We already have a model for “owning something that has ongoing costs and doesn’t increase in value, but it’s worth it for its uses”. There’s no reason we can’t view housing like that as well.

Joe Thomas

[via]

(via The Architect Remaking Santa Barbara, One Outrageously Fun House At a Time - Sight Unseen)

Verba Mystica

@gothsuburbia

forever intertwined

source

oh to have a silly little house like this...

the inside has to look like this.

@carnalreincarnated @misssquirrel

Pareidolia in houses 🏡

‘Pareidolia is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one sees an object, pattern or meaning where there is none.’

There's a nose on that house

Painted Cottages in Poland (x)