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OK three floors in my house, can forget bottom it was a garage, but why did the designers decide cloths washing should be done in entrance floor? The front garden is slopped and the drive takes up most of it, and you need to climb a retaining wall to access what little garden there is, completely impractical to string a washing line, the lower garden also on a 1:4 hill so also impractical to install a washing line, and one would need to descend a flight of steps to even get to the top of it, so this house has never had a washing line, other than across the balcony, which makes the balcony unavailable for sun bathing.

There is an utility room, and it seems likely this was always intended to be the laundry room, access from kitchen so could have been a pantry, unheated, so we simply open window and stick the tumble drier hose out of window, and close the internal door, drains were in the room, and water supply, so it does seem designed to be a laundry room, however we sleep on top floor, we undress and dress on top floor, wardrobes and airing cupboard on the top floor, so a load of energy is wasted carrying things up and down the stairs to wash and dry, and nearly every house I have lived in has been the same, why do we have laundry rooms on a different floor to bedrooms?

OK tradition was to hang out cloths to dry, but in this modern world even when there is a reasonable flat garden it is rarely used to dry cloths, I did look at whole idea of a heat recovery unit for tumble drier, but decided it would get blocked with fluff, so since the tumble drier takes air from the room, really needs to be a unheated room. So yes the room we have is good that way, however the open window to draw in replacement air is a security problem, well maybe not in this area, but if we blow air outside it has to be replaced from some where, and better if cold air from outside which since cold holds less moisture.

I think of the song, "Little boxes" made of ticky tacky, little boxes all the same, it seems very little thought has gone into house design, never worked out how cooking food and washing cloths should be done in the same room? In Turkey they have flat roofs and the washing is dried on the roof, the DHW is heated by the sun on the roof, and the peppers are also dried on the roof, there is easy safe access to solar panels, and roof is kept clean so dropping cloths they don't get dirty. OK concrete roof is easier to make weather proof to a light weight timber framed roof, however it seems in this country it is we have always done it that way, so we will continue to do it that way.

Even CAT house still has a sloping roof, may have considered heating in the Centre of Alternative technology, but not health and safety of people who need to maintain the building.

Caveat emptor.

Flat roofs are great in countries with little rainfall, not ideal here.

A friend of mine lives in Spain and has the flat roof type you mention, a useful space in the middle of the city. It leaks every time it rains, has done for years. All the roofs of his friends leak as well, it's a common thing for flat roofs there, but since it doesn't rain much they just live with it.

I was puffed out after going down and up stairs around 4 times in quick succession. I love the house don't get me wrong, but it seems little thought is used, bedrooms up stairs, cows and sheep underneath made sense in the middle ages so the cows kept the house warm, but things have moved on.

Heat does raise and I have noticed as a result up stairs does say warmer at night than lower floors once heating turned down or off, but as life progresses we tend to reassign what rooms are used for, so no longer have children's bedrooms, we have office and craft room instead. So we need the modern house to be adaptable.

So if I look at for example my central heating, every room has a programmable TRV head and I can select what room is heated when, but when we were house hunting we found so many newer homes where the central heating was split between the upper and lower floors, in the main the net result was you can only use EPH wall thermostats since they are the only opentherm thermostats that can be set master/slave, but they will not link to TRV heads, so the whole system is useless if you want to reassign rooms, what daft designer designs a house which is so inflexible?

I would say the biggest power user in a house is the heating, and in the main that is what should effect the design of the house. However the design seems to be either we have always done it that way, or we have to do this to comply with the law.