New Space

A good friend of mine is a real estate agent who sells new homes. One day she made the comment to me that, even though new homes are pricey, the money evens out when you consider how much you are going to sink into making your existing home the home you want.

I was eyeball deep in re-model projects when she said that, and it rang true. It is easy to sink $20K+ into even the most basic changes, even when you are providing all of the labor yourself! Sometimes, it feels like all of our time and expendable income will be going into this house for the next twenty years (and way more than $20K).

So, when we put our other home on the market in August, I had a great idea. Why not sell both of our houses and use the equity to build a new house?

My friend was kind enough to walk us through her models. I fell in love with the Pleasant View development--such a gorgeous panoramic view of the mountains!

Here is what I learned.

#1 New homes are way pricier than I was expecting. We were looking at a minimum of $300K for a smaller home on a smaller lot.

#2  Everything I loved about the model was an upgrade and the upgrades are 2-4x's what they would cost to DIY. As we would go through the home and the agent would say, for example, "That door in the walk-out basement is a $4K upgrade." Brian would say, "What!? I could easily do that myself for $1-$2K." And, pretty soon we had a list almost as long as my current list of all the changes and upgrades Brian would be making to our hypothetical new home. It kind of defeated the purpose. I was dreaming of what we would do with all of our newly discovered free time!

#3  Maybe it was just this particular builder, but I had a really hard time finding a floor plan that I liked. The houses we looked at all had an amazing great room and 3 bedrooms upstairs plus a full basement. The house that had the square footage I wanted had two 10x10 bedrooms and the master seemed a little on the small side. The great room also seemed just a tad squishy. When we moved to the next model up, the two bedrooms were 12x12 (nice), the master was just right and the great room was perfect. But, the basement was massive and the overall home was way too big. Three more bedrooms downstairs in both models. What are we going to do with six bedrooms? Ideally, we would have had the smaller plan with one bedroom eliminated to make the other rooms bigger. But, there was really no way to make that work.

#4  I was surprised by two things that got me really excited when I looked at the new houses. First, when I saw all of those bedrooms and imagined my kids in their own spaces, I couldn't stop thinking about how much they would love that. Second, I was overcome with visions when I entered a giant pantry that ran the whole length of a kitchen (behind a super cool secret door too). I loved that pantry! (BTW-a $4K upgrade).

This exercise taught me a couple of things. First, I had a renewed sense of gratitude for my current home. Second, I decided that we should make an effort to give our kids their own bedrooms. We were planning to make the boys share a downstairs bedroom and convert the one they shared upstairs into an office (it has a window, but no closet, so it isn't technically a bedroom anyways). That meant Ian couldn't have the Queen size bed he'd had his eye on.

Third, I realized just how badly I wanted and needed a bigger storage space and that helped propel our thinking into the idea to expand the basement square footage for this purpose. I am excited for all of our plans for the basement, but, oddly, I might be the most excited about the storage room.

The thing that really sealed the deal about not getting a new home was when Brian rattled off the list of things he would insist on doing to our current home before we could sell it. I was thinking, "If we got all of that done, I would want to stay!" Haha.

Now, we've started on that long list. I hope it won't be too, too long before we've made a lot of headway.

On an unrelated topic, Katie just brought me this note she found that she made for me in preschool last Mother's Day.  It says:

The thing my mother likes best is:  ME!!!
My mom is 60 feet tall and weighs 80 pounds
While I'm at school my mom:  Works (never was that more true than last year!)
Her favorite color is:  Pink, purple and turquoise (actually these are Katie's favorite colors)
Her favorite food is:  Soup (this is funny because Katie has declared that she hates 'soup'--kind of a broad category, but if I tell her we are having any kind of soup, she automatically dismisses it. She thinks I love soup and she once said a prayer with the words, "I'm thankful that we can like soup when we grow up.")
The best thing she cooks for me is:  Ramen noodles (how she loves these! I have to buy them infrequently or she would beg to eat them every day)
My mother says this to me the most:  "I love you."
If I had a million dollars I would buy my mom:  New keys (when I questioned her about this, she said she would buy me another set since I always lose mine-priceless!).