Poor Design Ideas for Your Home

After I think I’ve seen it all, more strange ideas surface in the latest home, housekeeping, and DIY magazines. As I read these, I wonder what planet the designers are on. Here are some examples.

In one national magazine, they predict how our homes will change in the future. Several of these ideas struck me as odd. The first one is that we will create a “mini mailroom” near our entrance door. In other words, a small room where we would sort mail and packages, and prepare mail and packages to go out. I thought about this. How much mail do we get? Do we need a room to handle mail?

No. We do not need a room to handle mail. Some days we don’t even get mail, and the days we do, it is easily dispatched to the read stack in the case of magazines and newspapers, and to the trash for advertisements. Few people seem to write those handwritten notes anymore. Unless you have more than eight people living in your home, I don’t think you need a mailroom. If I had any extra space in my house for another room, I’d designate it a junk closet.

Jib Door. I didn’t even know what this was until I read further and found out that it’s a piece of your wall between rooms that acts as a hidden door. Now this is exciting. Who wouldn’t want a hidden door? I’m making fun of this, but in one home I actually built a hidden door during construction. It hid an entire bedroom, and it gathered interest as I took friends on a tour of the interior. But I don’t think that this is in the future design of our homes.

A second kitchen. A “chef’s hideaway,” the magazine calls it. Indeed, there are times we want to hide, but I don’t see a second kitchen as the place to hide in. The magazine points out that a second kitchen or pantry gets clutter off the kitchen countertops — blenders, toasters, microwaves, and utensils — but I still don’t see this as a reason to add another room. There are plenty of clever ways to clear countertops in the single kitchen. For those of you who can afford to hire butlers and chefs, a second kitchen is a great idea, but I don’t see this as a general trend in new housing unless we all collectively win the lotto.

One trend for new homes that I agree is smart is induction cooking. I don’t know why this hasn’t caught on sooner. Prices may be one reason, but they are coming down. A typical induction range is a few hundred dollars more than an electric range.

Induction, or electromagnetic ranges emit zero toxic gases, and since they only heat the pan, they don’t waste any energy. When the pan is off the burner, the burner is not hot and can’t burn anything. Induction cooking is very fast, boiling water in half the time.

The bottom line? If you are designing a new home now, I’d go with the practical items and not get too far afield with oddities, which may adversely affect resale value down the road.