Houses

How could I possibly fail to understand something so simple and basic as a house. Yet somehow, I just don't get houses.

They're individually designed by university trained professionals in consultation with the end user. Then journeymen craftsmen visit the site and craft something unique, custom built and finished in the materials and colours you specify. It's not an instant process, they will work on it for months. Yet in the end, they're all exactly the same. Slightly modified rectangular boxes with 8 foot white ceilings and a pitched roof.

Seriously there's more variation in Cars which come out of a factory production line. They're not cheap either. Despite being made of such space age materials as pine and baked dirt. Sorry, I fell into sarcasm there. Compare them with say a boat, where every cubic inch is used, sometimes several times over, the space is simply wasted. It's not like land is free, it's damn expensive but you'd never know looking at a house. A 10m by 6m catamaran has sleeping accommodation for 10 people in 5 private sleeping areas, a shower, toilet, kitchen, sundeck, indoor/outdoor entertainment area along with all the boat related stuff like sail lockers and such. The furniture all comes included in the price and yet it's cheaper than a 5 bedroom house that comes with nothing and takes up a huge area. The boat is built to ride through crashing waves, but the slightest subsidence under a house and it cracks and breaks. An actual earthquake causes it to fall on your head and kill you. Most important of all, the boat is waterproof. When it rains, you stay dry inside! If you do find water gets in, everything is waterproof and you simply dry it out and it's good as new. Compare that to a house where if it gets wet inside you basically have to rip out everything including all the interior walls and start again.

It's just water

I'm not saying that you should build a boat on land, but surely there are better ways of building in the 21st century than baking dirt into little blocks and then gluing thousands of them together to make a house. I'm not finished with all the things I don't understand about houses, but more later.