Best Posts in Thread: What did you forget in your new place ?

I put a walk-in closet in our master bedroom and the first thing I had to do was remove the door...it got way too hot in there. I should have put in a louvred door and maybe an exhaust fan.

Shawn

 

Built-in closets. They weren't part of the floor plan choices we had, but we could have paid more to have them added, but didn't think about it.

 

Brian,

I would definitely consider a additional "dirty kitchen" outside with an extra gas stove, to be used for any deep frying (bananas, chicken, whatever), because that is the main culprit in producing that greasy "film" on nearby surfaces (especially the cooking range "hood").
Regular cooking won't do anywhere near as much harm as the deep frying thing.

 

You can get some useful ideas from Pinterest.

 

There are a couple things that I screwed up; being a construction guy it does bother me a bit. I did not realize how much rain would come beating in towards my kitchen door and window, almost destroyed the wood door and frame. When I first realized this during construction I figured I could block off the fence going solid instead of the cyclone wire that I used elsewhere, helped but the heavy rains found there way in.

Ended up going with putting in an overhang that protects the door and window with enough head clearance to walk up stairs. It actually ended up looking OK. Rain from that little roof is going to the closest catch basin.

I wanted universal style receptacles for the house, could not find them when we were building the house...ordered them from China, looked great but really started falling apart after a couple years. They are easier to find now so we are replacing all the existing receptacles and then looking at changing the switches...it is what it is but timing is everything, what I wanted was not available years ago.

Always fun and having a house is constant maintenance.

Shawn

 

Well...thermal mass of concrete is something I can talk about, a great idea for an other topic.

Shawn

 

Not so much a feature but location to me is the most important thing, you can change almost anything about a house but if it is close by to some karaoke playing, motorbike racing, daytime drinking card playing xxxxx then that is impossible to change unless you plan on leaving the country right after you change the situation.

 

Yes, the water coming off the nipa guest house is quite brown...but it is used for watering plants and they don't seem to mind.

Shawn

 

There is another smaller benefit of the 3m porch roof: the sun can not hit the outside walls directly. This means that the outside walls are somewhat cooler. This leads to less warm diffuse thru the walls resulting in cooler rooms.

 

I chop all my peels and scatter them over the garden, really helps a lot with the seeds I get to sprout and to fatten up the sandy soil in readiness to transplant them onto our lot. A friend here was amazed to see I was cutting the Banana Peels, turns out she turns them into Burger Patties! We are going to give it a try and see what they taste like!