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 Andy Rooney on Home Life
Dreaming Of A Dream House
Andy Rooney - from Common NON Sense
Just as soon as I have the time and the money, I'm going to build my dream house. It will be a big, rambling wooden home three stories tall with five bedrooms, a large kitchen with three ovens, a wood-burning grill with its own exhaust system and a small dining area near a window that looks out onto a rocky cove.
Some of the rooms won't be for anything. As the years go by, you always find you need an extra room and we'll have them. They'll be called "Just In Case" rooms.
There would be an attic and a basement. Each bedroom would have its own bathroom with a walk-in, circular shower. Because you'd be surrounded by pipes with pinholes in them, fine streams of water would hit you all over. The temperature of the water would be controlled by a gauge you adjusted on the wall before you got in the shower.
The television set would be in the ceiling so I could watch it lying on my back. Each room would be connected to the floors above and below them with a dumb waiter-a small elevator that would carry food, drink or baggage so no one would have to carry anything up or down stairs.
The living room would be cozier than big and would have a fireplace. Wood for the fireplace would be brought up from the basement on the dumb waiter. A small den off the living room would have just two comfortable green leather chairs, shelves loaded with books, and a television set. There would be a comfortable couch long enough so I could stretch out on it for a nap on Saturdays. (The television set would be equipped with an attachment that automatically switched it off when I fell asleep.)
The ceilings would be high and, because the bookshelves in the den would go to the ceiling, I'd have a lovely, rolling walnut ladder that I could climb to reach the books on the top shelf. I wouldn't go up it very often. I just like library ladders.
There would be a small office room for the computer. Adjacent to the computer room would be a small apartment. This would be where the computer expert would live so he'd be right there at all times when I had a problem with my computer that I couldn't solve.
Each bedroom would have a small door in the wall that opened on a chute down which you could throw dirty clothes. Clean clothes would be delivered the same way. The dirty clothes would drop directly into the washing machine, which could be turned on with a switch in the bedroom. Each room would also have its own small vacuum cleaner recessed in the wall so that no one would ever have to lug one up or downstairs. The closets would be equipped with those moving hanger belts dry cleaners have. You'd press a button and your clothes would start passing in review in front of your eyes. The clothes and shoes below would be dated.
Anything older than 15 years, unless expressly exempt from destruction, would be automatically thrown out. There would be a limit to the number of exemptions you could make in one year.
There would be a four-car garage although we'd never put more than two cars in it because the part designed for two more cars would be filled with outdoor tools, a wheelbarrow, lawn mower, hoses and junk that is not worth keeping but that I can't bring myself to throw away. The garage would be wide enough so that there would be plenty of room to open all the car doors. A moving belt, activated by the press of a button, would bring the bags and packages you put on it from the garage to the kitchen. At one end of the garage, nearest the kitchen door, there would be an extra freezer chest for overflow from the refrigerator in the kitchen.
The contents of the garage, the basement and the attic would be displayed on screens near the light switches in each location. When you turned the light on in the garage, the basement or the attic the contents of that room would be displayed with code numbers after each item indicating its exact location.
There would be a small bathroom in the garage. This would be a convenience for people who always seem to have to go to the bathroom the minute they get home.
The driveway and all the sidewalks leading down to the boathouse and out to my woodworking shop would have pipes underneath them with warming wires so that when it snowed, I could turn on the heat and the snow would melt as it fell on them. I'd never have to shovel.
There would be locks on the doors in the house but we'd never lock any of them because we wouldn't have to.
I would not have a swimming pool because, for the number of times you use one, it isn't worth the trouble and, anyway, what I haven't told you about my dream house and why we wouldn't have to lock anything is, it would be the only house on a small island. I am not certain yet whether my island home will be in an ocean or a lake.
The island would be about a mile long and just a few hundred yards wide. I don't have all the details worked out yet but I'm working on the design of some kind of bridge that could be extended out from my island until it rested on the shore of the mainland. After I drove over it, I would press my garage door closer and the bridge would retract into its housing on my island so no one else could come across it. Close friends and the mailman would have one of the openers.
There would be one wooded area on my island, up behind the house, and a good-sized open field where kids could play ball games. One end of the island would have a small, rocky hill you could climb and look out over the water. The other end would be a sandy beach with waves lapping at the shore.
In the small community nearest the house, on the mainland, would be a good, small grocery store, a hardware store, a bakery and, lucky for us, there would be a plumber, a carpenter, a painter, an electrician and a computer expert, all of whom would be looking for work when we called them.
If we left home for a few days, the toaster, the iron and the stove would automatically shut off so we wouldn't have to worry about whether we left anything on while we were away. |
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