Old notes that I never cleaned up. You are free to use this to develop mixed income units. It's fine if SOME are pied a terres -- upscale vacation homes -- but it's not fine if it's 100 percent luxury homes excluding ordinary people. (For legal purposes: Let's call it less than half can be pied a terres/luxury homes.)
For germ control reasons, I do not want the sinks by the front door. I want them inside the unit, away from the entrance.
Units with a private bath: The bathroom needs to be on an outside wall and have a window that can be opened for ventilation.
I like having the European style spray nozzle in the shower. No cabinet beneath the sink though. A pedestal style sink of the kind I have in my first SRO unit.
Whether there is a bathroom or not, there needs to be a semi kitchen nook with a countertop, a deep kitchen style sink suitable for washing dishes, (multiple?) plugs for appliances and a mini fridge beneath the counter (possibly below the sink?).
Public bathrooms need the privacy windows where you can open them for ventilation and no one can see in like the shower stall bathroom on the second floor of the SRO I lived in. This was a wide, short window and the bottom of it was about shoulder height.
The SRO had two public bathrooms per floor, one with a shower stall and one with a tub. They tended to lack adequate CLEAN means to store your clothes while showering/bathing.
They had a shower or bath plus toilet but no sink in the shared bathrooms. There should probably be sinks but no mirrors in the shared bathrooms.
Bathroom or no bathroom, the rooms need their own private and well-lit adequately usable mirror somewhere. Maybe by the sink, maybe not.
I'm not sure how best to optimize a sink for kitchen duty and personal hygiene BOTH in rooms with just a sink.
Kitchen storage should maybe be open shelves, not cabinets.
Internet access that is well placed plus an adequate supply of electrical outlets is essential.
I want to use the first room I rented as a model to improve on. For that room, the entire end wall would be the kitchen nook and the closet would face into the room but be in the same place.
Closets should have folding doors and be flat against a wall facing into the room.
There could be coat hooks on the wall near the door and a place to store shoes right there, a few inches deep on the end wall of the closet.
I want secured, assigned bicycle parking on the ground floor. Ideally, car parking will be available elsewhere on the block in a parking garage that people can rent spaces in long term.
The laundry room needs at least four machines but I also want the individual rooms to have a deep enough sink to hand wash laundry AND a place to hang the clothes to drip dry with a drip pan and drain beneath, like a variation of what I had in my military quarters in Germany in that cabinet with the radiator.
If you are poor and just one or two people, laundry is expensive and it can be hard to come up with enough clothes to do a full load. Hand washing needs to be supported.
There should be a dish drying rack positioned above the sink so you can hand wash dishes, put them away and not have to dry them and not need separate space for a drying rack. I saw this in a shelter magazine once, a kitchen that had this built in and they never put the dishes away. This was it.
For germ control reasons, I do not want the sinks by the front door. I want them inside the unit, away from the entrance.
Units with a private bath: The bathroom needs to be on an outside wall and have a window that can be opened for ventilation.
I like having the European style spray nozzle in the shower. No cabinet beneath the sink though. A pedestal style sink of the kind I have in my first SRO unit.
Whether there is a bathroom or not, there needs to be a semi kitchen nook with a countertop, a deep kitchen style sink suitable for washing dishes, (multiple?) plugs for appliances and a mini fridge beneath the counter (possibly below the sink?).
Public bathrooms need the privacy windows where you can open them for ventilation and no one can see in like the shower stall bathroom on the second floor of the SRO I lived in. This was a wide, short window and the bottom of it was about shoulder height.
The SRO had two public bathrooms per floor, one with a shower stall and one with a tub. They tended to lack adequate CLEAN means to store your clothes while showering/bathing.
They had a shower or bath plus toilet but no sink in the shared bathrooms. There should probably be sinks but no mirrors in the shared bathrooms.
Bathroom or no bathroom, the rooms need their own private and well-lit adequately usable mirror somewhere. Maybe by the sink, maybe not.
I'm not sure how best to optimize a sink for kitchen duty and personal hygiene BOTH in rooms with just a sink.
Kitchen storage should maybe be open shelves, not cabinets.
Internet access that is well placed plus an adequate supply of electrical outlets is essential.
I want to use the first room I rented as a model to improve on. For that room, the entire end wall would be the kitchen nook and the closet would face into the room but be in the same place.
I want secured, assigned bicycle parking on the ground floor. Ideally, car parking will be available elsewhere on the block in a parking garage that people can rent spaces in long term.
The laundry room needs at least four machines but I also want the individual rooms to have a deep enough sink to hand wash laundry AND a place to hang the clothes to drip dry with a drip pan and drain beneath, like a variation of what I had in my military quarters in Germany in that cabinet with the radiator.
If you are poor and just one or two people, laundry is expensive and it can be hard to come up with enough clothes to do a full load. Hand washing needs to be supported.
There should be a dish drying rack positioned above the sink so you can hand wash dishes, put them away and not have to dry them and not need separate space for a drying rack. I saw this in a shelter magazine once, a kitchen that had this built in and they never put the dishes away. This was it.
Frosted glass on the bathroom windows. Low maintenance, easy to clean design.
**A radiator for heat in winter and a box fan in the window for summer positioned such that they work in conjunction with the clothes drying rack.** Half baked idea. Needs to be researched and fleshed out.