Stupid but true

[james_davis_nicoll]

I like to look at online real estate listings to see how people use interior spaces. I've come to the conclusions that:

A: Few people use more than 2000 square feet effectively. Above that, they seem to run out of ideas about how to use each room*.
B: Lots of houses have gratuitous features whose purpose seems to be to make them unusable to mobility impaired people.
C: (this is the stupid one) Townhouses are fine but I hate the idea of a duplex. For some reason, having to cooperate with 50 people bothers me more than having to get along with one specific person or family.

* More libraries is always the right answer.

There was a place for sale just up the road from me whose entire basement was given over to sturdy-looking bookcases.

Comments

[thewayne]

YEESH!  I do some interlibrary loan transactions with them.  Sigh.  No, basement or lower libraries is not a good idea.  The worst that I knew about was Phoenix Public, their main branch.  They had a monsoon one yearn and a major thunderclap, and the rattling set off the fire suppression system.  It trashed the upper floors and did major damage, huge number of books lost.  Closed the building for a couple of years: they replaced the entire sprinkler system as it had rusted out - it was a dry system, no water in the pipes until use, and when it activated, turns out the moisture that had accumulated had eaten through the piping in a very uncontrolled way.

[telophase]

My 3-story former library had flood damage on floors 2 and 3 at different times. One of the fire suppression pipes burst both times. The basement never had water damage during the 18 years I was there, oddly enough. (The IT building, where so many of the big machines were in the basement, also had a pipe burst and flood the basement, but the library was fine.)