Moopups' post about sleeping in his van got me thinking about the walls in my house.
Don't ask me why...I guess I'm burning up some stress here that I accumulated throughout this day between my mom's care, the kids and their homework procrastination habits, my grumpy DH (he's earned the right to be, this time), and some volunteer work that I had to get done this evening....I get chatty when I'm stressed.
But anyway...are the walls in your home thin or thick? How does it feel to you? Does it affect the way you feel about your residence?
I grew up in a 1950's era house. It was made from lath & plaster. Nice and solid. DH and I moved into a little trailer for about 4 years to live cheaply so he could finish school and we could save a down payment on a house; boy, that took some adjustment. The house we ended up buying was built in 1927, so you know it had nice thick sturdy plaster walls. The lower half was brick on the outside, too.
But then we moved into one of those typical 1980's subdivision houses, and though I was really happy to be in a nice suburban area (our old neighborhood was practically inner-city and headed downhill fast) the thinness of the walls always bugged me. You could hear everything in the other rooms, even on opposite sides of the house. It was weird to hang a picture and have to reinforce the nail, which poked right through. Just something to get used to.
Then we moved here, into our 1965 home, and we're back to thick. In fact the cable installer said that our house was "built like a fortress." It's brick, then lath & plaster, and then it has another thin layer of plaster over that in much of the house - I assume they did this to hide cracks. (This textured stucco/plaster stuff was in our 1st house too.) When we first moved here, we actually had a problem communicating with each other. We were so used to yelling for each other and getting responses no matter where we were...We'd actually get mad at each other for not answering thinking we were being ignored, when truthfully we couldn't hear anyone yell! Between that and the size of the property...going out to the barn, etc....DH and I have taken to communicating with cell phones AT HOME, always keeping it in our pockets. I mean, if he's in the bedroom and I'm in my lower-level office, I can yell my fool head off and he won't hear a thing.
Sounds good...but as I noted in Moo's post, I can't hear the rain. Or the thunder. I can't remember the last time I heard a good thunderstorm. OK, granted, it hasn't rained much this summer! But the kids used to stay up all the time, fearful of loud thunderstorms. Here, gosh...I know my kids are getting older and kind of blase about such things...but you just don't hear it! Which I find kind of sad. It'll rain and we never know till the next morning and we see things are wet. I keep windows open as often as I can just to fix that sense of disconnect with the outdoors!
I guess it does help with the energy bills, though.
