The Bungalow Experiment
We’ve been sleeping downstairs recently because the heat has been absolutely unbearable. Warm air rises, of course, and so getting upstairs to bed at the end of a long hot day was like stepping into a furnace. After one especially unbearable night (even for Will, who does not have POTS) we brought our mattress downstairs and have been sleeping in the living room. It’s quite fun to do but at the same time, it’s kind of a bummer just neglecting an entire floor of our house because it’s SO HOT up there.
This got me thinking. What if longer term, our summers are just like this? What if it’s too hot to go upstairs? Our house plan has a screen porch we could sleep in during the summer, but what if that’s boiling too, as it’s above a conservatory??
So then I got onto, should we just live in a bungalow?!
And so I tried to turn our house plan into a single-storey home, without removing the elements of the original downstairs hall, living room, and kitchen that I really love. So that basically meant extending the house sideways.
I definitely prefer the two-storey version of the plan, it has a much smaller footprint for the same number of rooms, and maybe newly-built homes won’t trap heat upstairs at night so badly.
I added a somewhat Resident Evil-style courtyard in between the living and sleeping zones (I’ve said before that I wouldn’t need to live in something like the Spencer mansion, but after watching some Resident Evil longplays to get around our lack of working game consoles, I’ve realised there are quite a lot of things I like about that mansion, even if some of the space use and layout seems wasteful).
Anyway this is all basically a leak from my brain.
This house would probably be a lot more expensive to build, because the plot of land required would be much bigger.