House Thoughts

For some reason I've always been given to thinking about houses and how/why people live in them.

Why Bungalow?

I've found that for me the bungalow is the ideal type of house. It is like having a flat but with space and gardens outside. There are no stairs and I love the ease of living such that I can just get out of bed in the morning and walk straight to the kitchen. A bungalow is comparatively easy to heat I think because there's no upstairs floor to heat.

This is the second bungalow I've lived in now and each one has had a lovely large loft space, which I really like. This one in Hove has a garage which I love even though I don't have a car. The garage is the one good thing which the car has given us I think. In the garage I keep the bicycles of course and it is a great place for me to get on with my various "projects". It's a sort of super-shed really.

Internal Mass

One thing I really like about the house I live in at the moment is that all the internal walls are brick, there are no stud walls. This is good for a variety of reasons, one of which is that the internal mass is high. When the house is heated the brick interior walls help to retain that heat and so keep temperature even over time. As the house does not lose heat so easily then it is easier to heat when needed.

Cavity Walls

Around the 20's/30's cavity walls arrived. I remember a show on Radio Four a few years ago in which people were suggesting the "greatest ever invention" and someone suggested cavity walls. At the time I thought this was a bit odd but latterly I've started to think that maybe they had a point. The person who made the suggestion backed it up by saying that they felt that many buildings would last for hundreds of years longer than they would have otherwise simply because they have cavity walls. The bungalow I now own is the first property I've ever had with cavity walls and it has no damp whatsoever. All the properties I've had before this one have had some damp issue or other which has been minor but it is great not to have any damp problems at all.