Location Taken: Bay City, Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011
There are some fantastic houses as you follow Highway 25 through Bay City in Michigan. Each one is quite different from its neighbors, and each carries a personality of its own.
I wish modern architecture followed that concept rather than making cookie cutter houses. Sure, in some subdivisions, there is variation in the design, but they all still come from the same mold. They’re all around the same size, all with the same sort of yard and same sort of look. The houses built as the baby boom grew up (in the 70’s and 80’s) are especially egregious in this. Later houses have a touch more personality, but they still all have the same feel as their neighbors. They are clusters of siblings, not a community of individuals.
At least since the housing bubble burst, it seems to be getting better. The buildings I see put up recently have more decoration and style. There’s more brickwork, rather than the miles of plastic siding. I grew tired of those subdivisions built when I was growing up, in the late 90’s. They all looked like they were built to look expensive rather than be expensive. All the same design, and an uninspired one at that, and they had that look that just told you that corners were cut but the savings weren’t passed on to the people who live there. We called them Mushroom Houses, since they popped up like mushrooms after a rain, with how fast they were built.
I prefer the look of the older houses and neighborhoods. Where it is easy to tell one house from the next and the scraggly trees have grown into giants sheltering the children playing under them. The houses reflect the personality of those who built it and have lived in it. Better than the personality that comes across from far too many subdivisions, that of “I don’t fully care about this house and neighborhood, but I must keep up appearances”.
Still, I think I’d prefer to live in a brand new house, one that’s built with the increasingly-popular green ideals of the day. For one thing, they have enough electrical outlets and, unlike the old house I live in, they’ve all got the third prong. It’s a bit annoying having to run an extension cord through the entirety of another room from the one outlet on the floor that’s grounded just so I can have my computer in my own room.
I’ve loved looking at those houses in Bay City since I was a kid. They’ve done a nice job keeping them up.
When we had the laundry room under your bedroom remodeled into a bathroom, the plans were to run some new grounded electrical wires up to your bedroom. But the electrician hired as a subcontractor was not good at understanding or following instructions, as exemplified by the unusual arrangement of light switches in that bathroom, and did not do it.