Venneberg 1

William Venneberg

Professor Hoogheem

Humanities 101

4 October 2021

Unit 4 Essay A

My preference for my own house is unavoidably skewed. Do I like it?

Well, of course I do; it’s home. And because my experience for domestic

living environments is limited to this house alone, I can’t vary well tell with

definity what elements of it are preferable or not. All I can do is guess. With

those qualifications out of the way, what do I think of the house? Well, it’s

rather small considering the number of people that have lived here at one

time. With only three bedrooms, there was a time where the four of us boys

occupied one bedroom. Considering this, it is understandable that a larger

house would have been preferable, but space was never too much of an issue.

My house is also rather simple, an aspect that will be discussed throughout the

essay.

The house was built (to my knowledge) sometime in the ‘70s. I cannot be certain of what

all is original and what has been changed, but I believe I know of the changes that have

happened since ‘98 (when my parents moved in). As I have mentioned, it is a house for domestic

use. It sits on an acre yard and has attached to it a two-car garage.

It is a wood-frame building in concrete foundations that has the unnerving tendency to

groan in strong winds. On the outside, it has vinyl siding with a heavily weathered, wooden
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porch in front and back. On the inside, there are drywall and plaster walls in white and a (what I

presume to be) faux wood trim around the walls, windows, and doors.

For balance, the windows are centered on whatever wall they occupy. For the bedrooms,

they are also all an equal size and height from the ground each consisting of two panes that can

be opened out from the center. The trim and doors match in most of the house (some have been

changed). These features are about the extent of what repetition remains in the house.

Form clearly followed function in this house. Each room is its own within the house;

only a door connects one room to the next, except when traffic is presumed to be heavy (such as

between the hall, the kitchen, and the living room) in which case a door is foregone but only an

equally small hole is left. The trim and other matching feature seem to stem only from a minimal

focus on form.

The building sits in the middle of the acre on which it was built. The acre is not square,

nor is the home, so the perimeter of the house is closest to the property line on the sides (like

most houses, I guess). The land also has an incline. This makes the back door further from the

ground than the front door and provides space for basement windows allowing for a little natural

light there.

My house, I would say, acknowledges that natural light exists, grants a reasonable

allowance to it in almost all the rooms, but does not commit itself to it. Each window (consisting

of two panes of glass in most cases) provides about 9.33 square feet of glass for light to enter. On

most days, this can certainly be enough to operate by, but it could be said that the building

dedicates itself to utilizing natural light. The most significant use of natural light can be found in

the living room which features a large, immovable pane flanked by two openable panes, each

half the center’s size. These provide the greatest source of natural light within the house not only
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due to its size, but also because it faces south; however, the ratio of wall to window does not

seem to be all too different from the other rooms. It would seem that this use of natural light was

not a deviation from a standard, but rather a different result due to differing circumstances: the

outward facing wall is larger, ergo it gets a larger window. For artificial light, each room is

provided with a fixture in the center of the ceiling. The only room that deviates from this are the

bathrooms which also have fixtures over the mirrors.

When walking in the front door (presumably the intended way but a way that we use

rarely) one can see straight through to the back deck. When walking towards the back door, there

opens on the left a straight hallway towards the bedrooms and a bathroom: the children’s rooms

on the left and the bathroom and master bedroom on the right. A step forward and the entrance to

the living room is on one’s right. A few more and one finds themselves in the dining

room/kitchen. This is about the extent of the usually attended space of the house, but if one

wanted to go to the basement, they would turn right and walk through the kitchen, down three

steps, turn right and right again shortly after, and walk down the flight into the basement.

Like I have said, I don’t have too many complaints about my home. While a larger house

might have been preferable, there were not too many issues arising from its size. The closed off

nature of each room from the others might be aesthetically unappealing, but more walls are good

for separating oneself from the noise of one’s family. A house like this would certainly not be

my first choice for a house to live in, let alone be a template for a home I would commission, but

it serves its purpose well enough.