TW, you've got a way with words, I must say...

Tom Dacon

"Tom Watson" wrote in message
...
Around these parts a proper McMansion is a jumped up tract home that
sits on a half to three quarter acre lot, sells for between $800,000
and two million dollars, weighs in at about four thousand to six
thousand square feet, and looks exactly like the other fifty to two
hundred houses in its development.

They are not built, so much as excreted - as though a great angry
animal has walked across the countryside, eating up land, labor and
materials - and ****ting out houses - one turd looking more or less
the same as all the others.

This part of Pennsyltucky is the center of the universe for Two Story
Center Hall Colonials. I can walk into just about any one of these,
built during the last twenty five years and know that the living room
is on the left, the dining room is on the right, the Great
Room/Kitchen is down the hall to the back.

It's like Levittown - without the panache of the three digit mortgage
payment.

There is invariably a Master Bedroom Suite, with the Master Bath
attached. There is, without exception, a Library/Media Room - as
though the two could cohabitate without giving birth to an oxymoron.

These are stick framed structures, two by sixes mostly, in a nod to
the intemperateness of this portion of the temperate zone.

They are sealed up tighter than a gnat's ass and air conditioned and
central heated to within an inch of their lives.

The boxes are thrown up within a single season of a year. Being
enclosed so quickly, the wet framing lumber that the developers favor
is encapsulated in layers of sheetrock, sheathing and veneer stucco,
veneer brick and veneer stone - before the moisture has properly left
the sticks.

So a number of these well off people have breathing problems - and
wonder why.

In the regard of exterior detail, they are festooned with false
replicants of an earlier and more worthy age of architecture - as a
young child will drape themselves in the finery of their elders -
thinking themselves beautiful and sophisticated.

Their roof lines are complex and dramatic, and covered with
Architectural Composite Shingles, made to be a simulacrum of the
baronial slate that was worn by their betters - but which is truly a
tarted up version of the same chapeau borne honestly by the working
class homes in the next zipcode.

They are not for all time but for an age - an age ruled by mediocrity,
of design and spirit.

"Little Boxes
Little Boxes
And all filled with ticky tacky..."




Regards,
Tom.

"People funny. Life a funny thing." Sonny Liston

Thomas J.Watson - Cabinetmaker (ret.)
tjwatson1ATcomcastDOTnet (real email)
http://home.comcast.net/~tjwatson1