34 
House 
Garden 
& 
I F 
YOU ARE GOING TO BUILD 
The Problem of Localities and Sites Must Be Studied and 
After That Cellar Walls and Foundations 
I 
the 
F you have to buy property on which you 
are going to build your home, there are 
many things to think into before closing 
deal,—the location, the view, the place 
MARY FANTON ROBERTS 
And if the property is a part of an 
old estate you will not only go through many 
records but you will face strange groups of 
suspicious elderly ladies and you will meet in 
the offices of stern, irritable, elderly lawyers. 
ladies are in Europe and the old lawyers on 
a vacation. 
In time the title deed will be established. 
You must, however, be very patient and some¬ 
times young. 
Yffiu will be very fortunate indeed if you 
have money to buy your lot and star}: building 
without entering into the complications of bor¬ 
rowing from banks and building loan associa¬ 
tions. For the object of most associations 
seems to be to make it impossible to build 
within an average lifetime. Yet all these 
bridges may be, and are, crossed daily. 
Having purchased your site (and sometimes 
it is really the easiest thing in the world) you 
breathe more freely and turn your attention to 
the study of cellars and foundations. The 
foundation of a home is really the burden 
bearer. It is hidden away obscurely, obvious 
beauty is denied it, and sometimes the very 
force of its usefulness is unappreciated. And 
yet it bears the whole structure of your home 
on its shoulders, and the well-springs of most 
of our home comfort are hidden in its cool 
where you can swim or sail or paddle, a guar¬ 
antee of some sunlight and yet trees for land- But in the main you will find that all the old 
scape gardening, and a location that will be 
not too difficult to drain. The quick buying 
of a building site in an unknown locality is 
like love at first sight, “interesting but lacking 
in assurance”. \Ye take time to select a car, 
even a new book, why should we be swept away 
by a bright-voiced orator into a land lacking 
milk and honey, also plumbing and electricity ? 
When you seem to have solved every prob¬ 
lem and are ready to sign the deed, you will 
hear some say, “What about your roads? Is 
there a school nearby? Are you near the rail¬ 
road station? Where will you market?” And 
then you investigate all these dreary questions 
and return home light-hearted with their solu¬ 
tion, only to discover that you have not found 
out if there is a sewerage connection close to 
your lot, if the water and light from the adja¬ 
cent town reach your property and if you can 
easily get telephone communication. Cheap 
property becomes very expensive indeed if you 
have to pipe your own road for light and water 
and wire for a telephone and light. 
And do you want to be near a large city or 
in the suburbs of a village? 
You may not go to church, 
but all your maids will 
want to. And unless the 
children of the family are to 
be sent away to school you 
cannot afford to build your 
home without adjacent edu¬ 
cational opportunities. 
Tracing Titles 
And even these are not all 
your preliminary problems. 
Perhaps the most exciting 
thing about buying real es¬ 
tate is tracing the title of 
the property. You are never 
safe until you have gone 
back of the third and fourth 
generation. The vagaries 
of the average real estate 
title can carry you out over 
the country far and wide, 
and you will know more of 
the local history of the town 
and the life of neighboring 
families than you ever 
dreamed of as a mere 
dweller in rented spaces. It 
is a safe proposition not to 
stop tracing a title until 
every path traveled by the 
original settler has been 
Rarely is the cellar door a thing of beauty. Yet it can be made both inter¬ 
esting and useful if the cellar areaway is developed into a little greenhouse 
below the level of the living room windows. This is especially practical 
when the location faces south. Heat can be piped in from the cellar 
and, nowadays, sweet and sanitary depths. 
Of course in the ultra-modern home, the 
cellar, like the kitchen, receives its share of 
consideration and praise. It is made white 
and dry. Its windows must open to daylight 
and, if possible, sun. Its stairways must have 
head room. Its floor must be damp proof and 
sanitary. In other words, it has become a neat, 
practical working room for the whole house 
instead of an inaccessible recess full of dank 
odors and shadowy pitfalls. 
Modern Cellars 
At almost any time an ode to your roof tree 
could easily be composed, or a sonnet to your 
high and safeguarding walls; but a cellar is 
not supposed to inspire any emotion but faint 
hope, and that has nothing to do with archi¬ 
tecture. Yet the safety, health and enjoyment of 
most of your home depends more upon the cel¬ 
lar and its foundation than upon any other 
architectural detail. 
So “if you are going to build” you cannot 
think too long and intelligently about the 
“lower basement”, as the cellar today is called. 
If you want to seem surprisingly wise to your 
builder never ask him to economize on the 
cellar, or for that matter on the roof or the 
building material or the plumbing. There are 
possible only a few right 
economies in good building 
—fundamental ones like the 
size of your house, the num¬ 
ber of rooms, the grouping 
of your plumbing, the selec¬ 
tion of the wood trim, for 
many of the most durable 
and beautiful woods are the 
least expensive. But the ac¬ 
tual structure cannot be too 
good, from the bottom of the 
wall “footing” to the high¬ 
est peak of your chimney. 
No man wants the burden 
of building a home unless 
it is going to be beautiful, 
durable, and a really good 
real estate proposition. The 
very rich and very poor are 
the people most apt to sell 
their homes; the former be¬ 
cause they have spent too 
much money, the latter be¬ 
cause they cannot spend 
enough. In either case, a 
well-built house is its own 
financial reward. Think of 
your house building as a 
romance, but also consider it 
as a real estate investment. 
Unless you can afford a 
superintending architect do 
not start a home without 
