On Houses and Sunlight
I never thought I'd say this, but I kind of wish I'd paid more attention in Archeoastronomy. I kind of blew off a lot of stuff about where the sun rises and sets throughout the year, since I knew a lot of my classmates couldn't hack the math, so I didn't need to know it either.
Our north-facing condo at the Round, and my time unemployed last year battling with SAD, showed me that the sun's path is more complicated than I ever bothered to notice before. I was surprised to discover that we actually did get some direct sunlight. Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised, but I think of the sun as always being to the south (well, in Oregon anyway).
Okay, that's nice, so what? Well, when we buy a house, I want to make sure it gets enough light. I want it to be bright and happy like our south-facing condo in Chicago. Not like our north-facing cave in Madison, or our north-facing home now. My dream house would have the garage on the north side of the house, and big picture windows facing south and the back yard. It seems, however, that this was not a huge priority for developers in Beaverton.
We toured a great house last weekend. It's layout was just about perfect. Except that it had almost no windows facing south, although it was almost all windows to the north. Also, it's a little more than we'd prefer to spend, a little further from the light rail than we'd prefer to be, and has kind of a lot of freeway noise. I might have been able to forgive those things for all those windows if they faced south. It's on a hill, so limited options for adding south-facing windows.
Another house we are partial to faces a road slightly north of west, so the back, where the majority of the windows are, faces slightly south of east. Good morning light is a plus. The mostly south facing wall has almost no windows, but we could potentially add some. We're going to go see that one again on Saturday. And a few more I'm looking forward to seeing, though I don't think they will get particularly good light either.
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