The Farmhouse 148 r 



NEED OF A HOUSE PLAN 



The floor plan may be considered as the stage of home-making over 

 which the housewife travels in the discharge of her duties. Economy 

 and convenience of floor space will of their own accord effect step-saving. 

 Any woman having standards of home economy aims to do a maximum 

 amount of work with a minimum expenditure of time and energy. To 

 this end the areas of the house most traveled must be condensed and 

 waste space must be eliminated. A compact arrangement will result 

 from planning economically. 



Any house, in order to be a success, must be based on a rational plan. 

 Many poorly arranged houses may be replanned with some success, but 

 from a patched-up scheme there rarely results as direct and forceful an 

 arrangement as from one that has been planned correctly in the beginning. 

 For new work, emphasis should be laid on a plan that has been thoroughly 

 studied and definitely drawn before building operations are begun. 

 Various household conveniences are of course necessary. If badly placed, 

 however, they must fall short of complete success. Therefore a plan 

 that will anticipate the best placing of each convenience is of primary 

 importance. 



FARMHOUSE PLANNING 



A farmhouse is more difficult to plan than either a city or a suburban 

 dwelling, because it must provide for so many needs. The city or the 

 suburban house is merely a home; it is supplemented by an outside place 

 of business and by outside markets. The farmhouse, on the other hand, 

 must be not only a home, but also the business center and to a limited 

 extent the store and the market. This means that, planned as com- 

 pactly as may be, a farmhouse is necessarily larger in floor area than a 

 suburban house for the same family need be. Much thought and plan- 

 ning are therefore required in order to arrange this larger area in such 

 a manner that wasteful methods of work will be avoided. 



Traditional types 



It may truly be said that the problem of the American farmhouse is 

 still unsolved. For the building of new, appropriate, farm dwellings, 

 we have almost no precedent to guide us. Most of the rural houses now 

 standing are failures as farmhouses for the reason that they were not 

 planned for farm conditions. In fact, many of them were not planned 

 at all. They were merely built, and built in about the following fashion: 

 An outer shell was constructed and roofed over, the inside was divided 

 into rooms, and somewhere a kitchen was attached. If the house became 

 too small, more rooms were added to fit the growing needs of the family. 



