Making A House Hunting Wish List: a house log

First off, my cheeky hubby has chose 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 will move someday while I vehemently deny it (skip to 5 minutes and 45 seconds). Who is 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 is not quite flexible (the layout would have to stay fairly much the same) made us realize that an addition would not change things about the existing layout and allow us as much function and potential as an entirely new house would. So I slowly began to come around. But the revelation hardly happened overnight. Here is my range of emotions over the last half of a year of so:

No! I enjoy it here. I will die here. You will have to pry this house out of my cold dead hands. Wait. More projects? More function? I am kind of a function freak. I will think about it. Nope, I do not care. We got married here! We cannot simply abandon our beloved house. Grr, I wish we simply had one more bedroom and a full second bath instead of a half bath. What about an addition? Hmm, you are right, that is not going to work. But I enjoy it here! We enjoy it here! It is our home! Well, I am kind of bored. Are you bored? Fine, you might be right. Would not it be pleasant to have a pantry? Oh do not play the Clara card. Fine, I agree that it would be an remarkable thing for our family. And we would not be bored anymore. And it would be lively for the journal since we’d have a million new projects to share. Geez louise. Am I in fact considering this? I am? Fine. I am in. Let us do this crazy thing! Wanna go house hunting after dinner?

I am one of those people. I can fight something with every fiber of my being, but once I decide to go for it I am 100% in. No more fluctuating or hemming and hawing. It is like I run a full body scan about how I feel for a few months by playing devil’s advocate to be sure it is truly what I want. And then I submit with boundless puppy-like enthusiasm.

So that is how we got here. As for what we are looking for, we in short 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 quite 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 are bursting at the seams. And we realize that with a future kid (or kids) on the agenda in a few years it’ll certainly get even tighter. It is remarkable how when we moved in simply four and a half years ago we did not use either of the two spare bedrooms and now we work/play/sleep guests in one and sleep our baby in the other. It is simply funny how things change.

Which is why we are gonna go for a McMansion this time. Something with perhaps 17 to 18 bathrooms.

Simply kidding. Of course we are looking for another modestly sized seen-better-days home – with perhaps two full bathrooms instead of one and a half and one more bedroom, but nothing too insane. We’d hate to clean a large house anyway. We are more in the market for a home with simply a bit more space than we right now have (which adds up to around 1700 square feet counting the sunroom and the basement, which are not heated and cooled, which is why our house is labeled as 1350 wrapped up square feet). To have room for another baby someday would be grand. And a wee bit more breathing room would be pleasant in the meantime – especially since we live and work from home, so we are 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 are looking for a distinct layout since we mentioned that part of the reason an addition was not the answer to “saving” this house because the existing floor plan is not quite doing it for us anymore. Speaking of the layout, here is what we’d enjoy in the next house (we do not think we will get all of these features in one house, but it is pleasant to map them all out and hopefully find something with a good amount of them):

• Straightforward 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 likely 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 have consistently enjoyed 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 excellent).
• A pantry. That would simply be lively since we have 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 does not need to be near the other three – but if we have two kids someday we will want a way to keep their rooms and our bedroom on the same level while they are in that young do not-leave-them-up-to-their-own-devices stage.
  
• High ceilings would be remarkable, but that might simply 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 are certainly open to all home types (colonials, split levels, bungalows, another ranch, etc). Simply as long as it is pleasant and old and not too monstrous in size. Who knows where we will in fact end up. But speaking of the age of the house, here are some of our non negotiable must haves:

• Built a pleasant long time ago (we simply enjoy 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 glad and sane)
• Within our budget (duh)
• Strong schools (Clara’s education is the most essential thing in the end)
• A safe and well enjoyed neighborhood (the reasoning behind the word “safe” is obvious, and the “well enjoyed” thing simply means that even if our house needs assist we’d enjoy to be on a block with a few homes that have already been spruced up, so we do not risk over-improving our house for a crumbling-around-us neighborhood). We are trying to keep that whole” pick-the-worst-house-in-the-best-neighborhood” thing in our head.

We are also looking for a house simply 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-pleasant features on our list:

• A fenced in backyard that is Burger-ready (of course we can tackle this project if we do not find one as-is)
• A private backyard (we simply enjoy 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 will know when we find the one, simply like we knew instantly when we walked into this house. And we will 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…