Originally posted by: Fausto1
Originally posted by: bunker
Bought a house in Atlatnta (suburbs) two years ago, 2 story. Heating and cooling is a bitch and I will never own another two story home if I can help it.
There is almost always a good 4-6 degree difference between upstairs and down. Now, this can be fixed with a rather expensive second furnace/ac/thermostat, but I don't have that kind of cash floating around.
There are still quite a few one-story / ranch style homes down here. There's a developement right down the street from me that's doing nothing but ranches.
I'll add to this that the build quality of the newer development homes around town are generally below that of existing homes. I can't speak for other areas, but here in Atlanta they throw up new homes as fast as they can and it shows. I don't think I'll ever buy a new home unless I know the builder personally.
It's the same way here in Birmingham. While I have seen some very high quality new construction in a few of the newer neighborhoods, some of them are so shoddily put together it's scary (and usually it's a function of the price of the house as you'd expect.) There are plenty of exceptions to be found though if you look around enough. My family's full of civil engineers (including my dad) so I made sure he tagged along when we found homes we were particularly interested in. While in most cases, quailty differences were readily obvious even to an untrained eye, he was able to point out things we never would have noticed. Future (and even already occurring) foundation problems were a HUGE problem at a lot of neighborhoods we looked at. We were originally looking at patio style homes due to affordability, but lucked into a good deal on a full-sized two story w/full basement in a more upscale neighborhood built in '89. We love it.
The heating and a/c costs can be a pain, but I personally love having a two story. I grew up in a one story house so to me it's like having 2 separate mini-homes (3 if you count the basement .) We spend most of our time on the 1st floor, but during the late evening hours begin to migrate to the bedrooms and office upstairs so the upstairs doesn't
have to be as cool during the early part of the evening - but I usually keep it fairly cool anyway. The 1st floor doesn't take near as much to keep cool, however, which is nice. In fact, the 1st floor doesn't usually require much temperature adjustment at all year-round since it's sandwhiched between two other floors. Plus, we have a lot of fully grown trees in our yard (another advantage of having an older home with bigger lots) so we get a lot of shade.
Just make sure you have ceiling fans in all your upstairs rooms (this is usually standard on most homes in the southeast.) I throttle the upstairs A/C back significantly while we're gone during the day, but a few of the ceiling fans upstairs generally stay on all day to keep the air circulating so it doesn't become TOO stifling and impossible for the A/C to compensate for when we get home later.