[Others.045] Nice features of new houses in California

During my short stay in California, I found quite a few nice features which I like to share with everyone.

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The most impressive feature is the high ceiling, which I think is about 10 feet/ 305 cm high. The dark brown door in photo below is the main entrance, the plain white door at the far right is the garage door which is about the same height as the normal door we have here. Compare the gap between the doors and the ceiling and you can see the difference.

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The next feature I like is the smooth/round edges for all the walls. This would certainly be more child friendly than the sharp ones we have here.

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I also found they all have a big tray under the washing machine in the laundry, similar to this one. This would protect the floor from been damaged.

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There's also wallpapers been applied in some of the rooms. And as below, the light switches were beautifully covered with the wallpaper.

The switch at the far right has some sort of built-in sensor, which probably would turn on the light when it detects any movement. This certainly looks better than a separate sensor been installed on the ceiling corner and less wiring required.

[NextHouseToDo.001] Starting a To Do List for Future House

I have heard lots of not-so-nice stories about owners having all sorts of argument or dispute with builders. Luckily our experience with our builder has been quite positive so far. Yes, we did have some problems in the past (who didn't?), if you have been following my blog, they have all been settled in the end. And if there's a chance for us to build another house, God knows when..., we are quite happy to use the same builder again.

So, after moved in to our hour for about 14 months, I think it's time to start looking at how to think, and "dream" about how can we improve the process/design for our future, hopefully possible, but don't know when,... second house. I would like to cover all the things I can think of, not necessary only limited to builder/construction related stuffs.

Hopefully all my readers can also kindly share your experience with me, and with your permission, I would certainly like to post it in my blog to share with everyone. Let's all learn together to make the extremely complicate house construction process easier and better for everyone!

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The first thing I can think of is to understand more about the area, neighbours and council.

If you are going to build the first 2 story house of the street, you will surely get more resistance than the 2nd or 3rd one.

I also heard that if you just bought the house and decided to knock down and rebuild straight away without living there for a while and know the neighbours, the chance of getting complaints/objections for your application from neighbour would be much much higher. Which is quite true.

I was looking at one of the streets where there's currently a few new houses been built from our council web site last week. I was quite surprised to know that one of the application took almost 3 years due to lots of neighbour complaints, change of design, council requirement not been met, ...etc. One of the neighbour even hire a professional architect to write a 3 pages report detailing lots of problems of the application, which is quite amazing.

I guess in the end, you probably can get your application approved some way some how, after lots and lots of paper work, changes and phone calls, since it's your land/house any way. But just imagine the impact to your life, the stress, extra cost/time, and lots of others if your application get delayed for a long time.

So my first thing on the list will be to do a lot of homework to know the area well, and make sure you visit the council web site and study some of the current development applications to get a bit more understanding of the process and the council's requirement.