When we built our house 32 years ago, the economy was such that we could only afford a wooden house - although it was always an attractive proposition, the cost was the deciding factor. It was only a few years later that people began using cladding rather than wooden panels, which are a maintenance nightmare, perhaps coupled with the fact that they do rather resemble an OTT dog kennel. However, the advantages of a wooden house far outweigh the disadvantages, in my mind.
Advantages:
1. You can always hear exactly what is happening anywhere in the building.
2. If either of my children needed me for something, they would just knock on their bedroom wall and I would report for duty.
3. A floorboard always creaked if someone sneaked home in the early hours.
4. HWCFA can bang on the garage ceiling when he needs me to: bring coffee and biscuits for his friends, help him bleed the brakes, change a gearbox, let him know what exactly it is I am doing upstairs, rearrange the order of the cars in the garage and a host of other important and fulfilling duties. The scale of urgency is relative to the loudness of the knocking. Not for nothing is his official nickname Richter.
5. After all these years, I can identify every noise, from a cat jumping off the kitchen counter to a branch sweeping against the roof. A bird roosting in the eves sounds just like a rat scuttling in the ceiling.
6. It is warm in winter and cool in summer. We don't need a heater. The fireplace has been removed because it never gets cold enough to use it.
7. Its rusticity makes you feel as though you are on holiday.
8. Any time you want to make a change, you just take out a panel and rearrange everything.
Disadvantages:
Maintenance, maintenance, maintenance. That's about it.
There's no doubt that it is still my structure of choice, but perhaps a lovely Cape Cod-style duck-egg blue next time.
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