Building a Home

Before we even decided to have children Boo Wife was telling me that we would need a new home. It was hard for me to argue, although I often did, both my parents seemed to side with Boo Wife. Our condo with no real backyard and no real place to play outside was never going to be acceptable. I bought the place shortly after I moved here and at the time I was still single. It seemed like a good idea to have a place where I didn’t have to worry about mowing a lawn or shoveling the snow.

After Anthony was born, we sat back and thought a lot about what to do. The housing market had crashed so there were a lot of homes on the market in our area. In the areas we were interested in living, most of the homes were built in the 1920’s and 30’s thru the 1950’s. Now I have nothing against older homes. I love the architecture and the details that went into many of these homes and I envy the people that can go into an older home and remodel and fix up. Sadly, I am not one of those people.

There were several factors that made us decide to consider building, despite the bargains to be had and the potential loss to be incurred when selling our own home.
1). I think one of the key factors for me was energy efficiency. I love the old houses, I hate the drafts and inefficiencies of old houses. Sure we could remodel and re-insulate and buy a more efficient HVAC, and replace windows, (although the charm of many of the houses in our area are the leaded windows that decorate them). But as I already stated, I am not a good ‘fixer-upper’.
2). Older homes typically have small closets; small tucked away kitchens, and narrow hallways. The homes built in t he 1950’s tended to have lower ceilings as well. More remodeling, see all of the above.
3). If we were planning to raise our family here then why settle for someone else’s idea of a good floor plan. Boo Wife and I had some very specific ideas for our floor plan. Boo Wife wanted all the bedrooms on the second floor. If all the bedrooms were on the second floor then we wanted the laundry to be on the second floor. We wanted closet space off the garage entry for our coats, shoes, dog leashes, etc. I wanted an office off the same entry to drop off all the mail so it wouldn’t accumulate on our counters, as has been the case in the last 3 places I have lived. Boo wife did not like the vast openness of our Condo and preferred what she called a more ‘homey’ home. We both wanted a kitchen that had a lot of counter space and opened up to the family room. I have always wanted to have a walk-in-pantry, just for the added convenience and storage. We also wanted a formal Dining room, primarily so that we could have our family over for the Holidays.
4.) As an Italian I also wanted a second kitchen in the basement, but nobody else seemed to like that idea so it was nixed.

While this may not be everybody’s idea of the perfect floor plan it was what we thought would work best for us.

The problem was that we needed a place to build.

NEXT: A day late and a dollar short.