I suppose if you can afford a house like this you can afford a really nice new car every so often. A really nice car. Because a full scraping, sanding, and repair plus 2-3 color paint can cost over $100,000.

It's amazing how much the violent crime rate went down with the removal of leaded gas.

...that's essentially already liminal horror; it's been a thing my entire life but most folks don't recognise its modern incarnation since pop culture associates the genre with period affections of liminal horror from a century ago...

...it's driven by developer business models, the same reason lots grow narrow-and-deep: they're trying to maximise the market value of plattable land (square area) per infrastructure cost (linear streets + utilities), and narrow houses built right up to setback line means developers can squeeze the most 2500 ft^2^ mcmansions possible on their subdivided parcel...

Yeah that happens here because they are knocking down one house and building two. I don't really disagree with that, honestly. But they don't need to be that big.

Agreed. I have never lived in a house younger than 70. While there are upsides beyond style (old growth forest framing, solid wood floors) there are downsides - have always been able to get central air, even in the 1925 house, but so very many things have to be changed and fixed. I wouldn't even try with a 200 year old house unless I was so rich. But if I was, I might. Or might build a reproduction with some reclaimed materials and some modern touches.

Even in our house, half 1940 half 1990, new metal roof, roof attachments, hurricane windows, and we are not yet close to the current building standards. An endless work in progress, I would enjoy that if it wasn't financially stressful, but the house I love and it's not as stressful as a mortgage and taxes on a 1.5M ugly house.

If you have the budget to buy the ugly box, you have the budget to buy the cardboard house, knock it down and build something you like that isn't so enormous. We didn't have the budget for either so are just slowly renovating and hardening the house we bought.

My point isn't that houses are too expensive - that is beyond question at this point. Even your cardboard box would cost too much now for most anybody. What I do not understand is rich people buying ugly prefabricated stuff in general. I would use that budget for something bespoke.

Faux. Pho would imply they are made of soup.

Yeah ours has the vinyl and it does cheapen the look. It's on the list. The boxes though - they are just blocks made with concrete blocks and stucco-ed.

I like some gray but gray fake wood floors are among the worst, who thought that would look good for more than 5 minutes? I don't like marble floors either. Wood in a wood color is #1, terrazzo is fine, nice tile is fine.

I do know people have different taste but don't think that this exterior or interior could be pleasing to anyone, and again the house was well over a million $. Though to be fair they had to drop it from 1.5 to 1.2 to sell it, that is still too much and nobody is building anything reasonable except people who are hiring their own builders. All the speculative ones are either straight up boxes or something like this, going into a neighborhood that was just little houses, frame or block. For that $$ I would want much more kitchen too.

Look at this place baby... So much room. I could totally see us living here the rest of our lives.

......GeT.....OuuuUuut.......

To bad we can't stay baby!

Don't forget to collect on the security deposit for superficial damages.

Fun fact I once witnessed someone chug ranch dressing in a rural Nevada parking lot. I wish I filmed it because they drained it from new to empty in the same period of time it takes me to chug a gallon of water.

Poor guy...

The real truth is cost. To be able to afford to have this built, would cost a lot more than it did back then. Cost of living has become so high and you have to pay construction workers a living wage.

Yea a lot of people that sit in cubicles 9-5 would’ve been craftsman in the past

Also bauhaus influence

Oooooh, I love it. The haunted data center. Or maybe like Amazon warehouses too?

For some reason the thought of mail ordering a house from Sears has always seemed a weirdly comforting, once affordable American thing to me. Living in the western Chicago suburbs, I understand that there are several still standing in this party of the country.

only around 25k

For materials cost alone, mind you -- not including any labor you hire out in constructing it, and not including the land to put it on.

(And I'm guessing that 25k doesn't include any electrical, certainly not any HVAC, and maybe not even any indoor plumbing...)

Still, building codes and inspections aside, I think it could be a decent idea even in modern times to have mass-produced, mail-order house construction kits available. Trailer homes have kind of absorbed most of that niche, but they're not as well insulated or as long-lasting as real houses.

No idea. I thought it might be the combination to the gun safe, but that doesn't seem to be it. Sort of a LOST situation, I deemed it best not to get too hung up on the numbers, after much speculation.

I'm renovating my house which was built in 1942. Even though these houses were built as temporary worker housing during the war, the 2x4s are just insane quality. Perfectly straight and not a knot to be found in them anywhere. I repurposed some of them as stairway bannisters because they're so great.

Unfortunately, it took me awhile to notice that they're all 3.75" x 1.75". I knew older 2x4s were really 2" x 4" instead of the modern 3.5" x 1.5", but I never knew that there was an intermediate dimensional period like this. I kept building new walls 1/2" too high with them until I figured it out because they looked modern.

Try using bricks like the majority of the world

I love brutalism. I'm also not a fan of the design of the library.

Brutalism kind of requires an environment. But it's like a jagged tooth sticking out of a garden. Like a giant lawn rock. Lift it up and you'll find the keys to the American dream. Locked away like some davinci code nonsense.

Google search for Bracknell just pointed me to a town in England. What are we talking about here?

the house is real, image is upscale then...