Most painful of all is when the expensive improvement turns out to be worse than what it replaced. In recent decades many older houses in the American south that used to be up on wood or masonry stilts were decreed by their owners to look “poor” that way, so the open sides were boarded in. This cut off ventilation—the original reason for the stilts, forgotten when the local vernacular pattern language died—and termites and rot quickly brought the buildings down. Another frequent error is installing built-in furniture. It works beautifully when the goal is to save space, as in bungalows, but it
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