We Always Want What We Can't Have

About a month ago we went out with some friends for a day of kayaking and laser tag. While we were waiting for our guide/instructor I noticed a small room and so of course I had to poke my head in lol The room only had a coke machine and fireplace. . . . I've lived in houses with fireplaces and the size of them generally reflects the size of the room that needs to be heated. Well this fireplace was waaaay toooo big for such a small room!

It was so big I had to take a photo lol, then it got me thinking.... When I was a kid I preferred the American TV shows to the Australian ones. I loved everything about them, I loved that they celebrated Halloween and we didn't, I loved their houses so much! I loved that they had attics and basements and we didn't. I loved their fireplaces, they seemed so ornate and were built as a feature, not just something to serve a purpose. In the houses I've lived in that had fireplaces, they were so dull and boring - seriously! No thought had ever gone into the actual presentation of how it looked. It was almost like the house plans had 'fireplace marked on the plans' so the builders just whacked one up.

If you google American fireplaces, OMG. Some of them are pure works of art. Some are so fancy you wouldn't want to burn anything in them. This is one I found that kind of looked like the ones I saw in TV shows as a kid, nothing too fancy - but they were so much nicer than the ones built here.

Then just the other week my sister and I were talking about American homes, and she commented that we should be making better use of our land i.e basements and attics, I agreed. A few years back I did some research online trying to find out why Australian homes didn't have basements. Now I'm not a geologist lol but the information that I found basically stated that the ground water level in Australia is too high for us to have basements. That no amount of waterproofing would prevent water constantly seeping into the area. This made sense.... Case closed. 

So why don't we have attics? Have you ever been in the roof of an Australian house? I have lol This pic above is the roof framework, now there is no squeezing an attic in there. We have rather low roofs here, I don't know why, we just do. I have crawled around in the roof of a number of homes and you literally have to wriggle around like a worm to get between the beams, wiring, insulation etc.

There's a suburb about 50 mins from where we live and one day when my wife was driving I got to have a good look around and I saw that a number of homes in this area had attics! None of these homes were new or clustered together, which may suggest the same developer built them all. So straight away I was like "I want to move here! These houses have attics!" lol. 

So like the title says:- We always want what we can't have lol

Anyway, here's another pic of my progress on my Tribal Cat cross stitch. Can you see the sugar skull magnetic needle holder in the corner? My sister sent my wife and I one each in the mail the other day :) We had no idea that she had done this, so it was a huge surprise and we both love the choices she made :)