This Space for Rent

Oh my god.

Every summer, about the time when sensible people stop looking for houses to buy, the local housebuilders and development get together and have a mega-house exhibition called the "street of dreams". It is, as you can expect, over the top and as boring as watching paint dry all at the same time; a half dozen or so houses, each over 6000 square feet, all stuffed full of brand-name appliances and dozens of nasty focus-group tested features, and designed in a way that would cause your sense of taste to run, whimpering, for the exit.

This year is no exception; as usual, the houses are so expensive that they couldn't actually hire a talented architect, so what you have is the usual array of dormers, extra roofs, and, most importantly, a great big three or four car garage right up in front, so that anyone who visits your palatial house-of-crap must walk by the stables before they can go in the front door. And when you step inside, you get such features as his-and-her bathrooms in the master suite (plus a breakfast/coffee bar, so you don't have to walk 100 feet down to the kitchen and fire up your Viking®™© space-heater.) And, yes, every bedroom has a bathroom. And there are extra bathrooms for visitors. But most importantly, some of these houses have (and I'm not making this up), "man caves", which are an entire floor of the house set aside for every stupid stereotypical "man" behavior, from cigar rooms to sports rooms (with 4 televisions! And a bar for each chair, so you don't have to heave your fat butt up out of the chair when you want to go get another Bud!)

I suspect I'll never be rich enough to afford a house like one of these, and all I can say is thank G-d for that. For the US$2.5 million that they ask for one of these waterbuffalo, I could afford a house in a good part of town, a camp in the mountains, AND a beach cabin. And I'd not have to deal with the shame of living in a house with a "man cave" in it.