A well-designed house accomplishes a number or wide ranging goals. It provides for a safe haven from the world, a place for your family to gather, active space for family and solo activities, a work site for a home office, and a welcome environment for entertaining.

When a house meets all these demands, it provides a successful background for living. Your home should be easy, workable and convenient, as well as adaptable, flexible, and comfortable. Maybe your home simply works against you and not for you. Are you spending your hard-earned time and energy accommodating the house? If you are then maybe it’s time to renovate.

Take the following quiz. Judge your house on a scale of 1 to 10. With ten being the highest. At the end of the quiz add up your score.

The 10 qualities that create a comfortable, livable house

Rate your house:

1. Does your home blend in well with the setting or does it clash with the surrounding homes?

2. Does the interior layout of your house create inviting and comfortable rooms?

3. Does the roofline provide a sense of shelter and a coherent feeling for what the inside spaces are like? Or is the roof a jumble of unrelated, disproportionate shapes?

4. Are windows and skylights used to give rooms a balance of pleasing natural light? Or are some rooms gloomy and others too bright?

5. Are the rooms and components – walls, windows, doors and so on – in good proportion to each other? Or does the house feel unbalanced, with some parts too big or too small?

6. Does traffic move gracefully to and through the house? Or is the entrance uninviting and the inside traffic pattern restrictive?

7. Do the mechanical systems in your home make it comfortable? Is the temperature to warm in the summer or to cold in the winter? Are the lighting levels good for reading, relaxing, working?

8. Does the house have places of refuge that look out onto the rest of the house or outside? Or does every place in the house feel either out in the open or closed off and claustrophobic?

9. Does the house offer pleasing spaces between indoors and out, such as porches, breezeways and window seats? Or is the house more like a fortress, cut off from the outdoors?

10. Do the house’s finishing materials complement each other? Or do the roof, walls, windows, steps, flooring and other materials clash with one another?

How did your house score? If you scored lower than 80, perhaps it is time to think about renovating.

This article was provided by Bruce Borden at Walden Design Build – dedicated to getting you on the right path to a successful renovation! Visit them online at www.waldendesignbuild.com today.