The many anachronisms of house design, FHA and the two foot door

Since its inception, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) has had a great influence on medium to modest priced housing on a number of fronts; for example, most people are not aware that FHA set many design standards for modest priced housing. When I was in college I studied the FHA minimum property standards (MPS) manual as a monk would study his Bible.

The MPS manual set minimums for things such as room sizes and the width of doors. A hallway could be no less than three feet wide. A room to be considered a bedroom had to be at least eight feet wide and ten feet long. If a builder constructed a three bedroom house and one of the bedrooms was seven feet by eleven feet he could not sell it as a three bedroom house to someone buying the house with an FHA loan; it would be appraised and valued as a two bedroom house; the seven by eleven bedroom would be considered a generous closet.

The MPS guidelines for doors gave minimum dimensions for width and height into different parts of the house. The front door had to be at least three feet wide, while the back door could be no less than two feet and eight inches wide. A bedroom door had to be at least two feet and six inches wide, and a bathroom door could be no less than two feet wide.

Well into this century a large number of modest houses were built for buyers who use easy qualifying FHA loans (FHA loans are today becoming more and more popular on modest and relatively upscale houses). In an effort to build competitively, and still have their houses meet MPS guidelines, most builders constructed to minimum sizes: bedrooms had doors that were two feet and six inches wide, and bathrooms had doors that were exactly two feet wide.

Many of those builders were also constructing upscale housing. A few of them would increase the width of a bedroom door by two inches; there is a discernible difference between two feet and six inches and two feet and eight inches. As a rule, the front and back doors remained three feet and two feet eight inches respectively, and bathroom doors almost always remained exactly two feet wide even on the upscale housing. To this day, many houses designed to sell even into the hundreds of thousands of dollars continue receiving rear entry doors which are too narrow at two feet eight inches (they should be three feet like the front door), and the biggest design flaw: bathroom doors that are only two feet wide.

Since we visit many builder model homes and spec houses each year, we get to compare the less expensive to those considerably more so. We have been to houses pushing the million dollar price range (in the Dallas area and other modest-priced areas, mind you, not in over-priced parts of California) that had bathrooms whose entrance doors are only two feet wide; that’s a serious sin by any design standard.

Measure the doors in your home's bathrooms; there's a very good chance they barely meet FHA's MPS standards. Try moving swiftly into a bathroom with a door that’s two feet wide without smacking your elbows against the door jamb unless you tuck in your arms or turn sideways as you enter.

The last house I designed had all doors three feet wide, and the front and rear doors were six inches wider; rarely did I have to increase the size of a room or a hallway to accommodate a wider door on that design. And the cost of a wide door is a miniscule part of the entire cost of today's houses. If you visit model homes, take along a tape measure. If a builder of upscale housing uses a door that's two feet for ANY room or closet, you might wonder how many other design shortcuts he took on the rest of the house.

Narrow door widths (on any size home) are a design anachronism; a nuisance for the home owner and a very minor money saver for the builder. But you might wonder about the biggest anachronism in home building: wood houses (Would any highway engineer in his right mind design a freeway bridge out of wood? Would Ford design a wood car?). Most modern houses in this country are built as they were built two hundred years ago: basically wood boxes wrapped in brick or wrapped in a modern plastic or composite siding. They can easily burn to the ground; thousands of people die each year in house fires. A large number of folks are lost when a strong wind blows them away along with their houses, or are crushed when the wind slams the house down on top of them. And finally, countless thousands of people poison the ground under their houses so bugs won't eat the wood structure.

Wood houses are economical to build, but concrete houses, although somewhat more expensive, last for many generations while providing extreme safety and energy efficiency for their owners. If you’re in the market for a new home, you might want to look into DomeBuilder.