I skipped this thread, thinking, oh, I don't really live in a cottage. I am so glad I took the time this morning to read it. I love hearing the stories behind the homes. The comment about not being cottage prompted me to add mine. Our home is a late 70s typically California starter subdivision home. I did manage to get a design with only one window to the front, so I could pretend I had the craftsman bungalow I wished for. When my kids were hitting their growth spurt and there was no room in the living room for all the feet, we added our garden room. We have lived happily here for 28 years. The other day my sweetie was talking to bil and asked me, what style do we have in our home? I said, cottage? He said no. I said, craftsman? He said no. I said, lodge? He said, yeah, that's it. It isn't really of course, but we live a cottage lifestyle with a great love of the outdoors and our home is mainly decorated with twigs and pinecones and shells and rocks whatever other pretty things we find as we travel, with lots of heirloom fancy work thrown in for good measure. The front yard isn't even cottage, but we intend a major overhaul of that one of these days. I love love love the real cottages shown here, and those I've seen in other posts, but cottage is about where your heart is, right?

OK...Here goes. I added a basement under my garage which doubled my storage and workshop. In fact I moved my entire workshop down below. Here's how I did it. Since my garage was a 2 car model I decided to run an 8 inch block wall down the center. I started by making a cut in the floor just on the other side of the center line and removerd all the concrete from one side only. Next I began excavating the dirt down the center line. I did this all by hand by the way. When I got to within 6 feet of the east wall, the garage runs north and south with the door facing south. I dug a 4 foot trench to the east foundation. There I found out there was no foundation, the entryway and family room shared the same slab, so with the help of coworkers we excavated out the dirt and put in an 8 inch conctete block wall running the entire length of the east wall. We did this by laying up a 32 inch wall with a saw tooth and then excavated to the left and laid in the block we moved left to right until the entire wall was done. The tricky part was digging around the footings of the center wall, the house, and the south footing. A friend showed me how to dig out only enough to set in a footing with 2 8 inch block. We stacked these up saw tooth style and poured them full of concrete. Next we dug out next to the block and proceded to add block and footings as we went interlocking the saw tooth block. We made sure we only took out enough dirt to allow for 2 inches of rigid ins. behind the block. The footings along the door and west side as well as the interior wall poised a completely different problem and that was solved by the same process the difference was triming the foundation even with the block and laying up a new wall that when it got even with the foundation and exsiting block we drilled holes and inserted 5/8 rebar which we filled with concrete. This was done in a saw tooth fashion. Adding only a two block type wall each time. First we would do the right hand side and then the left hand side etc. As the basement took form we continued tying the new block to the old block which was 5 block deep into the ground. When we got to the top or the garage floor we laid in a half block so we could pour a 10 inch rebar floor. Since I had a wall running down the length of the barage we poured the floor in 2 pours. The wall had an eight foot opening with double 4 foot steel doors comerical grade. This allowed access between the two rooms that were created. The second pour wasn't as hard as the first because I put in a subterranean car lift that allowed me to store a third auto in the basement. I even excavated 10 feet under my driveway for additional storage and a storm shelter. The entire project took over 18 months. But the good thing about the entire project it was inside work and we only took out that dirt that allowed us to lay in block to support the existing foundation. My friend brought over his Heavy Const. book and showed me how the big boys do it and we followed their examples. The book is called Principles and Practices of Heavy Construction by Ronald Smith. There is a chapter addressing just such problems. Its called underpinning. But instead we decided to lay up a completely new wall and tie the existing wall to it. Once the concrete floor was laid the entire structure was tied together. The work was done during the evening hours with a trailer in the next bay that was filled with dirt. A friend needed the dirt so getting rid of it was easy. This is NOT a project for the faint hearted. It takes time and patience because you don't get a second chance if it all falls down. But with planning and slow steady work you can do it. My project costs about $13,000 but I had a lot of help and after it was done a few contractors said they wouldn't even consider the project. I did have to move my water line and a sewer line but as luck would have it they fit neatly behind the new block wall. The only outward appearence of the entire project was the PODS sitting in the driveway storing my STUFF while we worked. We stored the block, sand and mixer in the garage. I only purchased the amounts that would fit into the garage. I looked for sales too. This allowed us, me, to work 24/7 rain or shine. I now have a dust collecting system for the shop. No more dust in the house and my wife can get her SUV in the garage!!!!! The footing was 12 inch vee block laid sideways and filled with concrete and rebar with the ends sticking out to accept the next section of footing. This also allowed the new basement floor to be tied to the wall via the rebar. There are no cracks. YET.

This topic stressed me out a bit since we are the middle of work opening our kitchen to the dining room in our 1906 house. I'm already worried about whether everything will turn out ok. We thought a lot about this, though, so I'll weigh in. I apologize for the length - brevity may be the soul of wit, but it apparently is not my strong suit. We moved to our current 1906 Arts & Crafts house from a Victorian farmhouse which had the kitchen isolated from the dining room and living room, separated by a bathroom. We found it hard when we had people over since they were either crammed in the kitchen without enough room to participate in the cooking or they were way at the other end of the house. We saw that we had a pattern of having people over in the summer when we could congregate outside by the grill, but not much in the winter. We have a very close community of friends and we enjoy sharing meals in a very casual, family sort of way with kids playing, adults talking and cooking. We also found the dining room more difficult to use for everyday meals. Additionally, it was not possible to carry on conversations when in the two spaces or moving between them for setting, clearing etc. I enjoy cooking, but also like interacting rather than being isolated. When we decided to move we were looking to resolve this split and have a more connected common space. We saw many houses (and almost bought one) with family room additions connected to the kitchen which left unused living and dining rooms. These rooms had become merely somewhere to walk through, heat and cool. Some had little or no furniture in the abandoned formal rooms. We realized that we did not really need this redundant space. There is an excellent book by Sarah Susanka (Taunton Press), The Not So Big House. It talks quite eloquently about using space in an efficient manner. I personally like having one place to eat all meals. I like eating at the dining room table for just the reasons mentioned in posts above - slowing down, sitting on a chair instead of stools, in a space designed for eating, around a table (preferably round) which facilitates a relaxed, shared experience. The truth is that since we do not have servants, we often need to go back and forth between the spaces. Houses at the turn of the last century were often built to fit a more formal way of living which placed servants (even modest homes) or the women of the house out of the way while the hosts entertained in formal rooms. They were also built prior to the use of refrigerators. When we moved into this new-to-us 1906 house it had a (tiny) butler's pantry for staging serving, while the refrigerator was crammed into the food pantry in such a way that required near-contortionist moves to get a carton of milk. The only storage was open to mice or around the corner in the butler's pantry cabinet. Counter space was limited to the two drainboards of the 1950's metal sink. This was not the room of efficient post-work cooking and cleaning, much less any pleasant shared time. One of us would quite frequently get trapped in the pantry by another trying to get something. The rest of the first floor of our beloved home showed signs of the revolutionary changes that were happening in houses at the time, shifting from formal double parlors to more flowing open rooms with wide framed openings between them. I am in Oak Park, home to Frank Lloyd Wright, though our home was part of a far more modest working class development. It is stunning to see the differences among the different houses being built during the first part of the century. As central heating and radiators allowed rooms to open up, a social shift away from formality and toward more relaxed, real connection was also under way. Now that the social and technological changes that have transpired over the last century have ushered in a time of shared cooking, I welcome kitchens and floorplans that facilitate that. There are other times in history and other cultures today in which the communal kitchen holds a significant place in a community. Our new kitchen provides inward facing space where people can prep around an island. In our open floor plan I envision friends and family cooking and talking together, either within the de-cramped kitchen or between it and the dining room next to it. We are also concerned about creating something that respects the house's history, fits in with the architecture and creates a sense of two spaces with different but related activities. The disfunctional pantries were ommitted in favor of refrigeration and dish storage near the new dishwasher (uses less water than hand washing). We removed the wall between the kitchen and the dining room and are replacing a portion of it with shallow (12 inch)cabinets that create a partial division and open to both sides. There will be a 6 foot visual opening on top,stepping in to a 3 foot walking space at the bottom in a sort of key hole shape. As much as we love the big pocket door in the large opening between the dining room and the foyer, I doubt that we will use it. I just can't see part of our family sitting in the living room smoking cigars while another part of the family or servants quietly set the table out of sight. It has been a delicate dance trying to mesh the eras. We are having a duplicate of the missing original built-in hutch along one side of the dining room built, but it will have some wood doors in place of the original glass to house some less aesthetic items that have no other storage on the first floor since the one closet was turned into a WC in the 50's. We got a picture of the original at an open house across the street and noticed gloves and scarves displayed where china and silver of another time once shone. Life is not static and it seems to me that a key component to navigating the ever-shifting impermanence is to be flexible. I cross my fingers hoping that my ideas about homes and people actually work out in this re-working of our lovely old house. I do not disagree with any of the prior posts, I just wanted to add some thoughts.

Juliehc, it sounds like you're cooking. I like the cozy sound of saturated gray, but a white ceiling sounds both rather harshly contrasting and as if the white will set it off as not belonging with what's below it. That's a cousin to the problem illustrated in those initial pictures of a room that Hhireno so accurately described as decorated for a lower flat ceiling, with the rest just sort of...up there. A lighter neutral paint on the ceiling that was dark enough to blend calmly into the walls, or more accurately walls into ceiling as the eye travels up, would help make the ceiling part of the room. (I like beige with gray and wonder if that would be a place for it.) I was also struck by Hhireno's comments about the effect of furniture shapes in the pictures Palimpsest posted. This isn't the only way to decorate high volumes, but it certainly works exquisitely in those pictures. Allied with that is my own observation that in every one of those designs, which are meant to celebrate their wonderful high spaces and make them look their best (rather than "deal with" or ignore them as problems), is that dark, contrasting colors are kept low, while the rest of their volumes soar with little interruption to their lightness. Julie's going warmer and richer with grays and beiges, with a very different feeling in mind, but I feel sure there're lessons in there anyway.