If you had to design your dream house what would it be?

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That's a great idea.

I'm planning on doing a lot of work on the house this summer to make it livable again. Right now I'm staying at my office since I don't have any heat in the house.

It also needs some serious plumbing upgrades.

I don't like the master bedroom much. When you walk through the bedroom door, there are his and her closets on the left with room dividers and the bathroom on the right. After that is the master bedroom.

I'm undecided about opening up the bathroom. One possibility might be to leave it as a separate room but to put in a window between the bathroom and the bedroom.

I definitely intend to open up the closet, though, and put in cabinets with windowed doors and lights on the inside.

I like that idea. At one time I figured I would do the same thing.

As of now: I'd roll with small, energy-efficient (with solar/wind), tall ceilings and by a creek.

I had a sudden thought yesterday about what I could do with our old barn. It hasn't been used for anything in years but storage -- mainly oil drums and lumber. I doubt that anyone has even been inside it, other than me, in ten years. And the cats -- it's a favorite place for the feral cats to have kittens.

The barn is 40 feet x 20 feet. Inside, there is a wall across the middle. On one side is a 20 x 20 feet area that goes all the way up to the ceiling. On the other side of the wall, there is a hayloft about 8 feet above the ground. There used to be a tack room, but someone took that out years ago.

What I'm thinking would be really cool is to fix it up and turn it into a combination bunkhouse / office. On the side with no second floor, put in a kitchen/living room/dining area along with steps up to the hay loft. The hay loft would contain a couple of small rooms and a bathroom. Even better would be to make it one sleeping area that is open to the kitchen/living room/dining area and a bathroom with a shower, a crapper, and a sink.

In the 20 x 20 area would be a downstairs bathroom and a large office area. Alternatively, the office area could be used for game room complete with a snooker table. Or another sleeping area. There are lots of possibilities.

We could even make the bottom part the sleeping area and put a snooker table and bar in the hay loft.

Also, on the west side, a 40 x 8 foot screened in porch would be great as an addition.

A conversion from a British Railways Mk1 corridor coach. Actually a pair of coaches would be better as one can be a BSK.

I would love that. Fifteen years ago, I looked into buying an old railroad car, moving it to the farm, and converting it into living quarters, but the cost of doing much would make it unrealistic.

Also, as I'm getting older, there is always the reasonable possibility that in as little as five or ten years, I could possibly need a walker or a wheel chair to get around. That would make a railroad car conversion unlivable.

One interesting thing about farm building conversions in my area is that 40 years ago, you just didn't see it. The one exception I can think of was using our shop for church services in the 1950s while rebuilding the local church after it was destroyed in a fire. On a typical Sunday, there would be about 50 to 100 people there.

About 35 years ago, we converted our old bunkhouse (it housed up to eight hands at a time) into an office.

Then about 25 years ago, my younger brother divided his metal garage/shop in half. He converted the west end of the shop into something like a party room with a kitchen, a wood burning stove, some chairs, and a table. The east end was still used for a car, but when he needed more room for a party, he'd take the car out and put in folding chairs and tables for a big dining area. A lot of people in the area have been to one or more parties there. Also, during hunting season, there would be parties that included hunters from hundreds of miles away who came up for the hunt. There have also been wedding parties in the shop as well as a gathering place after local funerals including my mother's funeral. It's also been used for at least one high school reunion and one episode of a tv show was filmed in it.

Then maybe 15 years ago, a friend of mine from high school, after attending some parties in my younger brother's shop, felt inspired to convert his own shop to a party area. He has some unbelievably loud speakers so at the parties I have attended there, I stood outside about 100 feet from the shop in spite of it being below freezing outside. When sitting around drinking a beer in the mid afternoon without a party going on, he doesn't turn the music up nearly as loud and it is a really nice environment.

Another neighbor now holds an annual fundraiser for local scholarships in his quonset hut shop.

Another couple of people in the local town have built brand new shops to use primarily as a party area. Also, a local cowboy who has done well in the cattle industry bought an old shop in the middle of town that was used for many decades to repair trucks into a really first class party room.

I also know of at least two people who have built shops for the purpose of using them for living quarters. The one I know best is extremely well off and built a shop behind the house on a lot that he bought. He has living quarters on the south end of the shop so he can drive in through the door on the north end, get out of his car (he can easily park three or four cars in it), and walk directly into his living room. I really like how he did it. As for the pre-existing house on the lot, that's a guest house for when he has company.

So the conversion of shops for other purposes in my area has certainly increased, even to the extent of building a shop for the primary reason of using it as a party room or living quarters.

I don't know anyone doing this with barns in my area, but I do know that converting barns into homes has been something of a trend for several decades in some parts of the country. One reason could be that the barns in my area are typically not all that great to look at. My grandfather's barn was one of the nicest barns in the area that looked much like people expect barns to look. Unfortunately, it collapsed when hit by a tornado one night.

i would love it if i could remodel my tin can to resemble a premium motor home. with captain's chairs and such.

It is nice to dream though!

a bunker, built back into a mountain.

Something akin to that for me, too. A six-story cube carved out of a hill, to take advantage of the silence, the temperature control, and the relative isolation. Inside, split it into three two-story slices and have everything both modular and reconfigurable; have it be able to move rooms around at will and even assemble/deconstruct rooms to spec by moving different floor/ceiling/wall panels into place. The furniture would all be able to be lifted and moved by something like the little robots used in automated warehouses, either by the robots scooting under them and lifting or by some of the robots having grippers (and swarm software).

It'd make for easier room-cleaning, too - rooms which weren't in use could be broken down for storage, and anything in them could also be taken to cleaning and then put in storage too. Or the furniture could just be trundled out of a room while the room was being cleaned by cleaning systems. Press a button, come back in eight hours, and the whole house would have been dusted, vacuumed, hosed down (in wet areas) with assorted cleaning agents and water, dried, scrubbed etc. Or have it done weekly on a schedule, or something.

Anyway, it'd be useful to be able to change room layouts, sizes, volumes, and things like floor coverings and wall colors/textures. Pick up a new hobby, and dial up a new hobby room with tables, workbenches, relevant equipment, and storage/shelving. Get bored with it, and the entire room can be packed away into storage, getting cleaned in the process. Want to pick it up again later? Press another button and everything gets reassembled.

Damaged wall/ceiling? No problem; have the system replace that panel automatically. The panel can be put in a suitable workshop elsewhere in the complex, or sent off for repairs, or (in the event of having more extensive facilities) automatically broken down for parts and any sub-component which doesn't meet spec can be melted down and reforged.

Owning the entire hill, too, would mean being able to put whatever I wanted on the outside. Trees thick enough to walk around in and not be able to see out? Simple grass coverage, great for lying down on in summer? Gardens? Terraces? Some kind of giant glass ceiling arrangement so that the top floor(s) of the interior, and maybe others if light-piping was used, could have natural sunlight?

Franklin's fancy house in gta5

Yes I agree.

Talk about clipping the wings of your dreams!

One thing that I like to do is to look at real estate listings on the Internet to see how they made use of the space and how everything fits together. Sometimes, for houses that I particularly like, I save copies of the pictures to compare later.

From time to time, a house that I've looked at before goes back on the market after only a year or two. In many cases, the seller at the time of the first listing had owned the house for years.

What I find very interesting is that in a great many cases, I like the way the house is done when for sale by the first owner, but hate what the second owner did to the house. In most cases, they replace really beautiful decorations with very blah decorations. For example, a really great backsplash in the kitchen with one that is dull and boring. Or the old tilework in the bathroom with new tilework that is ordinary and without distinction.

Occasionally, there is a house that is back on the market with mixed results. I just got through looking at one a little while ago on the internet. The house had previously had a rather pointless wrought iron fence around it. Pointless, because the house was already surrounded by an adobe (or similar) fence that was about six feet high -- this house is in Santa Fe. The new owner took away the fence -- a very good move. Their choice of furniture was rather modern, but an old time adobe house like that really needs a more classical Southwest style of furniture. Their artwork was sometimes "okay", but the artwork in the living room was just plain silly. Previously, the master bathroom was had gorgeous tilework, but the new owner stripped all that out and put in tiles that are so boring that it would make you want to avoid going in there. On the other hand, the half bath was overall an improvement.

Why do people seem to like buying a fascinating house and making it dull and humdrum?

By the way, one of the more fascinating houses I've seen on-line lately is near Borger, Texas.

See https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/100-Chamisa-St-Borger-TX-79007/228381304_zpid/

One thing that can be fun is to try to figure out how the house is laid out from the photographs. This one has a whole lot of pictures.

What is interesting, at least to me, is that the master bedroom has a hallway that goes through the bathroom area (shower on the right and sinks and crapper on the left) to the closet. It seems clear from the pictures that there is a second door into the closet from the breakfast area! Without so many pictures, it would appear that the closet and laundry areas are separate, but from the pictures it appears that the laundry area is part of the master closet. It took a while to figure that out from looking at the pictures.

If I was wealthy, I'd love to build a similar house to that in my area.

By the way, there are a number of people who try to figure out the layout to houses and apartments from tv shows. Has anyone paid attention to these? Some of them are very realistic. One of the least realistic is the ones for the Big Bang Theory show. According to the analyses, such an apartment building would be rather oddly and inefficiently shaped.

i was utterly disgusted when the mushheads who won the simpsons house rebuilt it to resemble just another boring tickytacky tract house. what an total lack of imagination on their part.