rooms

One of the big problems with indoors cats is that they frequently prefer to be outdoors cats and keeping them in when they want to be out can be, well, a bit tricky. As anyone who has attempted to keep a cat in can attest, they are very good at slipping unnoticed between legs, jumping out through windows you didn’t think they could reach, or squeezing through gaps you could have sworn were too small.

When my parents got Castor and Pollux, they attempted to kitten-proof the garden so that they couldn’t roam. That worked well whilst they were little, but eventually they figured out how to get around the strategically positioned chicken wire. No matter how hard my dad tried to find and plug the holes, they would find a way through.

Cassie, in particular, has a love of roofs and will leap from roof to roof, all the way down the road.

All three cats, Cassie, Polly and Fflwff, also have a fascination bordering on the obsessive with the front door. Given the opportunity, they will make a run for it, hiding out under the car or disappearing off into next-door’s garden before you can blink. Indeed, I think they believe the front door to be the gateway to Shangri La, so keen are they to get through it.

If my parents had a porch, however, they could use it a bit like an airlock, closing the inner door before opening the outer. That would prevent the usual cat location and head count ritual prior to each leaving of the house, and would make accepting deliveries and guests a much simpler process.

(If my parents sound a bit obsessive themselves, I can forgive them. They’ve had so many cats die in car accidents they are very protective, although they are easing up a bit now that they’ve realised that not only do they live in a much safer neighbourhood now, but also that the kittens can out manoeuvre them nine times out of ten.)

If you’re really serious about keeping your cat inside, though, a utility or mud room can fulfil the same function for the back door, allowing you to ensure that kitty never gets anywhere near slipping past you. I like the idea of a mud room - a place to take off muddy shoes, hang up wet coats and dry umbrellas. Kev’s very keen on the outdoors, so one day, a mud room is going to be essential.

But what about windows and patio doors? In the US, they use screens to keep out flying insects, but they can also keep in recalcitrant moggies intent on experiencing the great outdoors. I’m not overly keen on the look of screens, however. They do rather ruin the view, so if we move over there I’ll have to find some recessed screens that I can hide away in the wall when they are not being used.

It may sound a bit over the top, but if we are going to be serious about having happy and healthy indoors cats, then we need to plan for these everyday realities. And it’s far easier to include a porch, mud room and screens in the original design than it is to add them later when you realise how useful they’d be.

I love baths. As a kid, I hated them: the old enamel bath sucked the heat out of the water as soon as you got in and our ParkRay fire struggled to provide enough hot water for a bath and the radiator, so in the winter the temperature in the bathroom would be uncomfortably cool. And I am allergic to soap, so baths used to make me itch, until some nice scientist invented shower gel.

Now, I love baths. There is nothing better at the end of a long day than a soak in the bath, with a glass of wine and my husband reading to me. Aaah, bliss. Our bath, however, is so small that you end up sitting in a puddle with your knees around your ears, which is not the most relaxing of positions.

And the water still goes cold.

Enter the BathOMatic Eco, a bath control system that fills the bath itself, prevent overflowing, and keeps water at a consistent temperature. Oh, I want one! But wait… there’s the BathOMatic Eco Ultimate, which adds an automated fragrance and bubblebath dispenser. Or the BathOMatic Eco Whirlpool Ultimate, with all the features above and a spa setting for the most relaxing bath ever! I have seen - and been in - many beautiful baths in my time, but a bath that sets and keeps a constant temperature would be just heaven.

Mind you, heaven doesn’t come cheap. The SelfBuild & Design magazine priced the basic BathOMatic at £6463, inc. VAT. And that doesn’t include the bath, as the website says “bathomatic can be added to any bath, including retro-fit, and by any qualified and competent plumber.”

And, for the geeks amongst us, the BathOMatic can be controlled from “any location via a LAN”, meaning that Kev could control my bath from his computer… which could be a good or a bad thing, depending! And to top it all, the brochure includes a photo of an iPhone interface for the control system, which seems to indicate that I could run my bath whilst I was on my way home.

This definitely goes on my wishlist!

Kev and I went over to Illinois a few weeks ago for our American wedding reception - a party at his parents’ house. The weather was pretty atrocious. A stationary front sat across middle America, spewing out violent thunderstorms and tornados. We missed one tornado by 12 miles, and there were Tornado Watches (be aware) and Tornado Warnings (be prepared to take action) many of the days we were there.

I will confess, it made me a bit nervous. Thunderstorms I don’t mind, but the idea of tornados scares the bejeezus out of me, mainly because I simply don’t know what the signs are that you have to go and hide in the basement. If you’re in a town, then there will be a tornado siren, but you can’t hear them from Kev’s parents’ home. One thing I would like to do on Kits and Mortar is to research various weather-related and geological issues such as tornados, floods, hurricanes and earthquakes, but in the meantime, all this talk of basements set me to thinking.

Kev’s parents have an enormous basement. They live in a single storey ranch-style house, and the basement has really good head height and is roughly the size of the house footprint, although I don’t think it extends under the garage. For Americans, this isn’t unusual - lots of houses in the US have basements and they provide not just a massive amount of storage space, but also maybe additional living space, and at the least, a laundry.

Even if you don’t do much more than use the basement to store stuff, I love the idea of having one. It’s cooler than the rest of the house, so with an air recirculation system you can actually use that air to cool the rest of the house on hot days. And of course, if a tornado does come, you can run down to the basement and hide in the northwest corner (relevant bit is Myth #5).

Of course, in the UK we rarely have strong tornados, but we do get about 33 each year which cause minor damage. We also don’t seem to go in for basements quite so much either. In Bath, for example, where I thought there were loads of basements, it turns out that these ‘basement’ flats are in fact at ground level, and the road has been built one storey up, supported by arches and with vaults underneath. Sounds a bit like Ankh-Morpork to me.

You do sometimes find houses with cellars, but again, they are not very common amongst the houses I’ve ever seen. A friend of mine had an old flint and brick house in Arundel which had a cellar accessible from a stairwell that led down off the lounge. It was dark, dank and cold down there, and if you stored anything there for any real amount of time, it would go mouldy. The floor was rubble, and you had to bend over to get in there because the ceiling was so low. Hardly ideal.

I do wonder why we don’t have more basements here, given how useful they are. Is it just a fashion thing? Are basements just out of vogue in the UK? Are they that much more expensive to build? Are there issues keeping them dry? It’s notable in the episodes of Grand Designs that have required a house to be ‘tanked’, i.e. made waterproof, there have always been problems. Kev’s parents use a pump to keep the basement dry, which is problematic if the electricity goes out, as it did one day we were there. But it’s not an insurmountable problem.

I really am curious to know why basements aren’t more common here, so please do leave a comment if you have any insight!

Kevin and I love books. We have just one sad little bookshelf here in our flat, which holds those books of mine that I cannot live without, and others that we have bought between us since we moved in together. The rest of my books are in boxes in my parents’ loft and Kevin’s are all in boxes in a 5ft x 10ft lock-up in Maryland, USA.

I think one thing that we’re both really looking forward to, one day when we buy a place somewhere, is getting all of our books together in one spot and unpacking them in our own little library. Indeed, I’ve always wanted to have a library, and Kev has to, so I think that it’ll be one thing that’s definitely included in the plans for our house, when we get round to drawing them up.

Thank you, Stewart *

Turns out that we’re not alone in lusting after a library. An article in the Telegraph, Interiors: Rooms that lose none of their shelf life, (found via Shedworking) says that:

In the survey of 4,000 people, 15 per cent said they would like a library compared to 13 per cent wanting a gym, 9 per cent a music studio and just 8 per cent a home cinema.

That doesn’t really surprise me. Books are special things, they have a warmth and humanity lacking from many other physical objects. They have a smell that reminds me of childhood, and they are the instantiation of knowledge, discovery, and escape. Despite the invention of the ebook and ebook reader, I doubt that paper books will ever go away as a product, because collecting and displaying books is still, for some of us, a great joy.

Of course, you need some space to have a room designated specially as a library, but that doesn’t mean you can’t line the walls with books. My Aunty Stella, out in Sydney, Australia, discovered the last time that she moved house that she had 9 cubic metres of books. She discovered this because she packed them all into tea chests which are a metre tall, wide, and deep. She then discovered that a tea chest full of books is too heavy even for beefy Australian removals men to lift. When they weren’t in boxes, her books lined every spare wall in the house on shelves made of planks and bricks - a shelving technique I’ve used myself, but which requires one to have quite considerable faith in the strength of your floor.

If you don’t have enough space for a library, or to line your walls with shelves - we don’t, there are no spare walls in our flat at all - then you could always try the technique used by London couple, Leonie and Rhodri. In remodelling their top-floor flat, they converted their loft into a bedroom and put in a staircase that doubles as a library. (Lots more pictures in the Apartment Therapy gallery or on Gizmodo.)

Personally, I’d be scared of kicking the books, and of going arse over tit down such a steep staircase (it’s almost more ladder than stairs). Being left-handed and left-footed, I’d be likely to put the wrong foot on the wrong tread at the wrong time, and I hate to think what would happen next.

I’ve always had a bit of a thing for libraries that have an upper gallery, such as those you find in castles and stately homes. There’s something about having to go up a ladder, preferably a wrought iron one, to a little balcony in order to fetch down a book that appeals to the hopeless romantic in me. In such a library, the urge to cover remaining wall space in Jacquard tapestries and to have a carved limestone fireplace big enough to talk into would be almost too much to resist.

This gorgeous two-storey library just makes me drool uncontrollably. Kevin too.

Thank you, Champagne Chic

Can you imagine having such an amazingly beautiful library in your house? More to the point, can you imaging having the budget to have such an amazingly beautiful library in your house? Wow. I struggle a bit, but it gives me something to aspire to.

* This is so weird. Wherever possible I use Creative Commons licensed photographs from Flickr on my blogs, and I reckon that about 50% of the time, the images I use turn out to be from people I know. In this case, not only do I know (vaguely) Stewart Butterfield, he also happens to be one of the people who started Flickr. But the fact that his photo was the first one to shop up on a CC search on ‘home library’ is entirely co-incidental. Obviously I just know a lot of good photographers who use Flickr and CC licences!

One of the most wonderful things about our honeymoon apartment, apart from the fact that it was in Barbados, was its bathroom. Or rather, its master bathroom, it having two.

I may have mentioned before that our flat in London is small. Just how small was emphasised by this bathroom, which was bigger than our bedroom. It had a built-in wardrobe thrice the size of our tiny little thing, a walk-in shower, hot tub, separate toilet, and two sinks in a huge vanity unit with more storage than I would know what to do with. With stone coloured tiles, and dark wood doors and woodwork, it was a lovely bathroom.

But whilst the hot tub was nice, the bit that blew me away was the shower. It was a generous size - easily big enough for two (I hope that’s not TMI!). But it had something I’ve never seen before, but which I now know I want in my future bathroom: five shower heads. Yup, that’s right. Five.

The first was a normal shower head, positioned exactly where you would expect it, raining water down upon your head. Then there were a pair of smaller heads at about chest height, and another pair at about hip height. All five were controlled by a rather mysterious rotating handle which change the flow of water from a traditional shower to a full-on drench-o-rama. It really was truly a magnificent shower.

I hate to think how much water it would take, but as I’m intending to both gather rainwater and recycle water in our future house, I’m not too fussed about it. Most of the water that we use is only slightly dirty when we throw it away, so there’s no good reason why it can’t be cleaned up and reused. Whilst “reduce” may be the first of the three Rs, water is not something worth skimping on when a bit of ingenuity can make it potable again. (I’ll cover all that in future posts as I do my water research.)

Another item of bathroom furniture that has become a lot more important to me is my bath. I didn’t used to care much for baths, prefering a quick shower to a long soak. As a child we had weekly baths, every Sunday night whilst The Money Programme was on. I had a tendency to be less dirty than my brother, so I generally got to go in the bath first and then my brother got my water, topped up with some hot.

Our bathroom then was tiny, and the bath was an enamel thing that took up most of the available space. The water was heated by our Parkray coal fire, until dad installed an immersion heater, but even then sometimes the hot water would run out.The fire didn’t have enough oomph to heat the water and the radiators, so the bathroom was a bit nippy in the winter and I would dry off as fast as I could, get into my nightdress and go and huddle with the cats by the fire to get warm again.

As soon as we got a shower fitted, I used that instead, and have quite happily stuck to showers ever since, with only the occasional bath to relax.

Things change, though, and now I yearn for a decent bath. It was a year before we used the bath - as a bath instead of a shower - in our current flat, thus discovering that the overflow wasn’t plumbed in at all. That wasn’t because I didn’t want to take a bath, but because it is so tiny that you just can’t relax in it. I can’t straighten my legs out, so rather than relaxing in a nice, calming bath, you end up dipping in and out so quickly that it seems pointless spending all that time actually drawing the water in the first place.

Now, though, I want a bath that I can fill full of Radox and take a good soak in whilst Kevin reads to me. I love being read to, and I love reading to others, so one of the little rituals we’ve settled upon is that we read to each other before we go to bed. It’s a nice way to unwind and put ourselves in a nice, sleepy frame of mind. Indeed, the other night, Kevin nodded off mid-sentence in a shameful display of endearing cuteness.

What better way to extend that ritual than to sit in the bath whilst Kevin reads? Currently, that means he has to sit on the loo lid whilst I scrunch myself up and try not to dislocate anything doing so. No, I’d much rather have a nice big bath with a comfy chair next to it.

Indeed, I’m even thinking of having a bath in the bedroom. The first time I saw that on TV I couldn’t believe that someone would do that - it seemed completely stupid and irrational. But I’m coming round to the idea of having a bath in the corner of the bedroom with a nice comfy chair next to it.

The two drawbacks I see are that it’s easier to keep the air temperature high in a bathroom, so that you don’t have the problem of your submerged half being warm whilst the rest of you gets goosebumps. The other issue is ensuring that the floor doesn’t get wet. Whilst you don’t want a bathroom-like floor in your bedroom, you also don’t want soggy carpets either.

Another pet peeve with baths, though, is the thermal properties of the bath itself. Our old enamel thing used to suck the heat out of the water with fearsome speed. I’d get it to just the right temperature that it would be comfortable to get into, and just as I started to settle down, the water would go cold. Indeed, I complained about this so much that when dad had to re-plumb the bathroom he wound a few coils of hot water pipe around the underside of the bath to try and warm it up a bit.

Freestanding baths are gorgeous, but if they are made of metal they’re going to be colder than a witch’s icecubes. I suspect I’d be willing to forgo the sleek aesthetic of the freestanding tub so that I could have something to hide the lagging.

But whatever we decide on, I’m going to enjoy thinking about and designing our future bathroom, in anticipation of all that luxuriating.