First off, my cheeky hubby has decided he’s deserving of a public “you were right.” So here it is. Check out this video from a year ago where he calls that we’ll move someday while I vehemently deny it (skip to 5 minutes and 45 seconds). Who’s married to a know it all? This girl (points to self with thumbs).
Before I climbed on the moving bandwagon UHaul with my smarty pants spouse, we rethought a bunch of potential layout adjustments to this house and even entertained the idea of an addition instead (which we also tossed out as an option in the above video over a year ago). But the fact that the already-here part of our home isn’t very flexible (the layout would have to stay pretty much the same) made us realize that an addition wouldn’t change things about the existing layout and allow us as much function and potential as an entirely new house would. So I slowly started to come around. But the revelation hardly happened overnight. Here’s my range of emotions over the last half of a year of so:
No! I love it here. I’ll die here. You’ll have to pry this house out of my cold dead hands. Wait. More projects? More function? I am kind of a function freak. I’ll think about it. Nope, I don’t care. We got married here! We can’t just abandon our beloved house. Grr, I wish we just had one more bedroom and a full second bath instead of a half bath. What about an addition? Hmm, you’re right, that’s not going to work. But I love it here! We love it here! It’s our home! Well, I am kind of bored. Are you bored? Fine, you might be right. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a pantry? Oh don’t play the Clara card. Fine, I agree that it would be an amazing thing for our family. And we wouldn’t be bored anymore. And it would be fun for the blog since we’d have a million new projects to share. Geez louise. Am I actually considering this? I am? Fine. I’m in. Let’s do this crazy thing! Wanna go house hunting after dinner?
I’m one of those people. I can fight something with every fiber of my being, but once I decide to go for it I’m 100% in. No more fluctuating or hemming and hawing. It’s like I run a full body scan about how I feel for a few months by playing devil’s advocate to be sure it’s really what I want. And then I submit with boundless puppy-like enthusiasm.
So that’s how we got here. As for what we’re looking for, we basically have a good amount of living space in this house (a sunroom, a den, a living room, a kitchen, a dining area, a front porch, a back patio) but we only have three very small bedrooms on the other side of the house. So with a baby, a need for a full time two person office, and a bedroom for ourselves we’re bursting at the seams. And we realize that with a future kid (or kids) on the agenda in a few years it’ll definitely get even tighter. It’s amazing how when we moved in just four and a half years ago we didn’t use either of the two spare bedrooms and now we work/play/sleep guests in one and sleep our baby in the other. It’s just funny how things change.
Which is why we’re gonna go for a McMansion this time. Something with maybe 17 to 18 bathrooms.
Just kidding. Of course we’re looking for another modestly sized seen-better-days home – with maybe two full bathrooms instead of one and a half and one more bedroom, but nothing too insane. We’d hate to clean a huge house anyway. We’re more in the market for a home with just a bit more space than we currently have (which adds up to around 1700 square feet counting the sunroom and the basement, which aren’t heated and cooled, which is why our house is labeled as 1350 finished square feet). To have room for another baby someday would be grand. And a wee bit more breathing room would be nice in the meantime – especially since we live and work from home, so we’re here nearly 24/7. Oh and the idea of two showers instead of one thrills us to no end. You know, so we can renovate one while using the other (instead of hosing John down outside in sub zero temperatures like we did when we tackled our current bath redo).
And of course we’re looking for a different layout since we mentioned that part of the reason an addition wasn’t the answer to “saving” this house because the existing floor plan isn’t quite doing it for us anymore. Speaking of the layout, here’s what we’d love in the next house (we don’t think we’ll get all of these features in one house, but it’s nice to map them all out and hopefully find something with a good amount of them):
- Easy access from the kitchen to a BBQ/eating area on a patio or back deck (right now we walk through the den, laundry nook, sunroom and then go down stairs and all the way across our patio to get to the table and the grill- which is probably why we hardly ever eat outside)
- A kitchen that we can expand into a family room (yay for knocking down walls) with a big island for kids to do homework and a cozy sectional in the seating area beyond. We’ve always loved the idea of creating a place where a lot of our friends and family can gather (and being able to accommodate everyone in one big room would be awesome).
- A pantry. That would just be fun since we’ve been using two kitchen cabinets as a pantry for so long. We’d feel like royalty with a pantry to call our own.
- Four bedrooms (or three bedrooms and an office) of which at least three bedrooms are on one floor. Since the fourth room can be devoted to an office it doesn’t need to be near the other three – but if we have two kids someday we’ll want a way to keep their rooms and our bedroom on the same level while they’re in that young don’t-leave-them-up-to-their-own-devices stage.
- High ceilings would be amazing, but that might just be a pipe dream. Consider this bullet “icing on the cake” territory.
- A flat-ish backyard without a big treacherous drop off (for B & C’s safety).
We’re definitely open to all home types (colonials, split levels, bungalows, another ranch, etc). Just as long as it’s nice and old and not too monstrous in size. Who knows where we’ll actually end up. But speaking of the age of the house, here are some of our non negotiable must haves:
- Built a nice long time ago (we just love an old home with character and eons of potential behind all those dated decorating decisions of yore)
- Located in a walkable neighborhood (our long evening walks keep all four of us happy and sane)
- Within our budget (duh)
- Great schools (Clara’s education is the most important thing in the end)
- A safe and well loved neighborhood (the reasoning behind the word “safe” is obvious, and the “well loved” thing just means that even if our house needs help we’d love to be on a block with a few homes that have already been spruced up, so we don’t risk over-improving our house for a crumbling-around-us neighborhood). We’re trying to keep that whole” pick-the-worst-house-in-the-best-neighborhood” thing in our head.
We’re also looking for a house just like this one was (totally livable and safe for us to work on it as we went) as opposed to a falling down house that needs months of work to make it habitable. You know cause we have a baby and a dainty-ish small dog. Plus updating kitchens and bathrooms and making other cosmetic changes while we live there is the sweet spot for us anyway.
Beyond our must-haves and our layout like-to-haves, we have a few other would-be-nice features on our list:
- A fenced in backyard that’s Burger-ready (of course we can tackle this project if we don’t find one as-is)
- A private backyard (we just love ours so much that it might be the hardest thing to leave behind)
- A garage (since we have things like mowers and bikes that we’d rather not store inside- although a shed could work too)
We figure we’ll know when we find the one, just like we knew instantly when we walked into this house. And we’ll get to add another key to our key frame. So stay tuned for more house hunting details as we embark on those adventures. Of course we plan to share what we look at and what we like/dislike along the way…
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