As I begin to think about what a house should look like I am struck by the nature of the beast. My family and I will actually have to live there, probably for years and perhaps decades. I could easily vapor lock on this kind of problem (I have been known to spend 20 minutes picking out the perfect hammer, and don’t take me to a grocery store unless you have a LOT of time) and find that I have spent days grinding on issues/options without making any choices. The basic issue here is that sometimes too many choices make me question my decision making and then lead to expectations that are unrealistic. Essentially a terrible case of choice-overload ensues. Sometimes less is more.

Usually when faced with decisions that require this kind of insight to solve I remember one of my favorite Mamet lines from the movie Heist, “I … imagine a fella smarter than myself. Then I tried to think, “what would he do?”"

Put another way, I google, looking for the smarts I don’t have, but can copy. I am a huge fan of serendipity, Dirk Gently style, so I often hit google in an almost random way. First thing I found was a few references to the aforementioned smarter fellas, guys who have though a lot about the design patterns inherent in building structures for people. And I thought that was only a software thing… nope turns out the Bricks and Mortar people have been thinking this way for years. And they are also thinking about the concept of refactoring buildings too. If you dig a little further into this you find that people use pattern language to describe the patterns inherent in the successful design of most everything. Now that is damn cool. The books are on order from Amazon, should be good reading and help me make progress on the march to a new house.