Shaped by Climate

(More about this house at the end of the post.)

If you just got hit by an arctic blast and live in a house with vulnerable plumbing, you may be thinking (as my mother and I each have) that in the event that you ever build a house again, you want to fly in a plumber from Michigan or Minnesota for it so your water pipes will be safe in a hard freeze.

Why aren’t houses on the Gulf Coast built that way?

• Partly because it’s cheaper to run the supply pipe up an exterior wall and then run pipes across the attic.

• Partly because in places like southeast Texas, houses tend to “settle” over time. This was no problem when we put them up on piers and could easily jack up a settling corner, but it’s a problem with a concrete foundation. The stresses of a moving concrete foundation would break plumbing run under the house. Getting to the breaks to fix them would be difficulty, expensive and messy. It’s possible to build a house so solidly that it won’t move, but it isn’t easy or cheap.

• Partly because being too hot is more common than being too cold along the Gulf of Mexico. Before air conditioning, ventilation was essential. I mentioned being able to gaze outside while standing at the kitchen sink to wash dishes, but that’s a happy side benefit of putting the kitchen sink at a window to the outside. A good breeze while standing over a sink full of hot water and dishes was more than a nicety. It was your only hope of not getting heat stroke.

Transition Zones

For five years I lived in northeastern Maryland and worked in northern Delaware. It was fascinating. The Mason-Dixon line is the northern edge of Maryland. It was barely north of me. Everything changed in the zone from half an hour’s drive south to half an hour’s drive north. Housing went from southern style with large windows and generous porches to northern salt box style with less window exposure and nothing extra around the outside of the house. Southern houses were designed for taking advantage of breezes in summer. Northern houses were designed to keep heat in during winter.

Why? Because the climate changed there, too. In winter, often there was snow half an hour’s drive north of me, cold rain half an hour’s drive south of me, and freezing rain (the rain fell and then froze after it hit the ground) in the transition zone where I lived.

People changed, too. Marylanders were very southern, hospitable, habitually nice. Go into the post office where I lived and you would invariably emerge feeling like your interaction with the stranger behind the counter had been an enjoyable little encounter with a friend. Go into the post office where I worked, which drew staff from Delaware, Maryland, Pennsylvania and even southern New Jersey, and you could tell which state a staffer lived in by the way they behaved. You could get anything from sweet to sour, from friendly to brusque, depending on where a staffer lived.

Climate shaped people, who in turn shaped the houses.

Climate Impact Embedded in Culture

Air conditioning is almost ubiquitous along the Gulf Coast now. You might think the kitchen sink doesn’t need to be at a window any more, but culturally it still does. The influence of climate runs deep.

More than 15 years ago I gutted and redid a house in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I wanted an unusual kitchen design that would have kept the house from having pipes at or close to outside walls. A hard freeze would not have required shutting off the water and draining the pipes.

Everyone around me said not to do it because if I ever wanted to sell the house, nobody would want to buy it. People would want the kitchen sink to be at a window to the outside.

They were right. I had a conventional kitchen layout after all. It’s fortunate that I didn’t dig in my heels about my idea because I did end up selling that house, and people in the deep South tend to want the kitchen sink to be at a window to the outside.

Being Set Up for the Usual

Climate shapes us in ways we don’t always recognize. That in turn shapes how we build our infrastructure and the way we do things, setting up to be comfortable with range our weather covers most of the time.

We have trouble once in a while when the climate throws us weather that goes outside the bounds of “most of the time” and isn’t what we prepared to handle. Last summer there were remarkable heat waves in the USA, UK & Europe, and other places. For most of the continental USA right now, we’re having extraordinary cold. It isn’t what we built for because it doesn’t happen often.

Does it?

Hmm. Climate change… Maybe it’s time to call that Michigan plumber.

P.S. - About the House Photo

Today’s photo is of Valentine House, 1908 Decatur, Houston, Texas. It was built in 1890. It is listed in the National Register of Historic Places by the U.S. Department of the Interior. My brother rescued it from decrepitude and substantially restored it, then sold it to people who recreated its wraparound porch and completed restoration of the house.

Photo copyright Bonnie D. Huval in 2015.