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Location: Longview, Washington, United States

I live in a small town in Washington State, USA, with my wife, two sons, two dogs, a cat, and family nearby. I work at the local community college as an I.T. Specialist. In March of '02, we bought a 70-some year old house that needed a lot of work. When I'm not working on the house, I like to throw pots, be outside, and read a lot.

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Monday, April 04, 2005

I'm Looking At the Man in the Mirror

Last night Brit and I came to a somewhat painful revelation. Even with nearly unlimited funds, time and energy, our house will never be the house we want it to be. Considerations in design and layout are such that we will never have the house we want if we stay put. This is not the house we want to grow old in. I imagine this feeling is similar to realizing that your child is a loser and always will be a loser, no matter how much you love them (not that I’d know!).

Items that will never change:

  1. The house will always be 50 feet from the road on a straight away stretch. After seeing our little puppy run out in the road and get hit last summer, my hear leaps into my throat every time I hear a motor and know that the full grown dog (who is a total spazz) may decide to run out in the road at any time. I don’t imagine this will get any easier as T gets older
  2. The house will always have two stories with narrow little stairs going up to the upstairs bedrooms, a spiral stair going down to the basement and 24 steps up from the driveway to the front door – fine for now, but who wants get old in house built for monkeys?
  3. The house will always be backed up against the hillside in a valley that runs NW by SW, meaning that it cannot be remodeled to extend back and that there will never be good light for gardening.

So where do we go from here? Now that we’re thinking in temporary terms, how do we change our projects list of priorities?

At the very least we would need to accomplish the following before putting the house on the market:

  1. Redo the upstairs bedrooms
  2. Refinish the downstairs bath (wallpaper, etc.)
  3. Replace the back deck (a project for this summer)
  4. Repair or replace the shop roof and replace a lot of the wiring and insulation.
  5. Refinish the basement floor, probably laying tile.
  6. Re-landscape the upper yard (Oh the muddiness!)

I think it would be fair to say that our house looks its best in the summer, so the question becomes, how many summers from now should we shoot for? 3, 4, and 6 are all summer time projects. Could I get them all done this summer? I have about a month’s worth of vacation on the books. I think if we really killed ourselves, we could get everything done in one year but two would be a lot more realistic. I wonder what my folks will say when, at 31 with a wife and fam-damily, I want to return to the nest?

What sort of a place do we want instead? Well, in a perfect world, we’d be able to buy other property on Clark Creek that is farther up the valley where it opens out a little. We’d like to stay about as close to town as we are now and as close to my folk’s house as possible. I’d like to build a ranch style house with lots of room around it. We like the vaulted ceilings in our front room and bedroom but not in the bathroom (hard to heat). A bigger kitchen would be nice – certainly an open one. We need at least three good sized bedrooms. We Clark Creek Dennis’ run to be the bigger sizes and need the elbow room. An out building or even a largish attached garage that I could turn into a shop/studio would be a big plus. As I said earlier, I’d also like a place with breathing room all around the house – not squished into the side of hill the way we are now.

posted by Scott in Washington at 2:21 PM |

8 comment(s):

  • Yaaaayyyyy!
    Steve

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 4/04/2005 06:51:00 PM  

  • Yer just excited because now we might get a decent guest bedroom and there will probably be more renting of power equipment involved.

    Brit and I drove down to Vancouver tonight and back for school, talking about the idea most of the way. The five year plan sounds good to us, both as a benchmark for finishing whipping this place into shape and also to give us plenty of time to plan, talk, decide, do research, etc.

    By Blogger Scott in Washington, at 4/04/2005 09:29:00 PM  

  • I think you should take your summer, do as much as you can, and get the heck out of that place. Start over as soon as you can in a place a little less resistant to getting how you want it. Another 5 years in a house you don't like is another 5 years of headaches, thowing money down the crapper, and time wasted taking care of problems you don't have to put up with.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 4/04/2005 09:48:00 PM  

  • I think you should take your summer, do as much as you can, and get the heck out of that place. Start over as soon as you can in a place a little less resistant to getting how you want it. Another 5 years in a house you don't like is another 5 years of headaches, thowing money down the crapper, and time wasted taking care of problems you don't have to put up with.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 4/04/2005 09:49:00 PM  

  • Keith and I have come to this realization many times, except I think that if we had a little more money we would have done more by now (which is pretty much just the destruction)

    but I guess that is what first homes are about, unfortuatlly.

    ps. It's spelled Keith if you want to change your links. :-)

    By Blogger Talia, at 4/05/2005 10:35:00 AM  

  • I'm so sad for you! I'm very attached to your house, but I loved your old round house too. It will be exciting to find a new place, too. Mike and I talk of buying and renting out a second house so that we can feel that thrill of going deeply into debt again. :) Luckily, we have more sense than that.
    I know we won't be in our house more than a few more years, so I too feel the pressure to get things up to snuff so that it will be an easy sell. Houses definitely look more marketable in the summer. Especially houses with muddy yards!

    By Blogger Kasmira, at 4/05/2005 12:55:00 PM  

  • In the early 1980's we bought a home that was built in 1880 and wanted to make it into our dream home. We started simple, insulation and new plumbing which turned out to be a two year project. The house was on wood railroad beams so we needed a foundation, impossible with our funding. OK to the walls, strip the wall paper and what we found was very old plaster board another two years, we needed a new ceiling a new roof and that back of the house where the washer and dryer were outside was rotting off needed replaced. We realized that we would be putting in as much time replacing and creating a dream as we would building what we really wanted. The decision was hard but the best. We bought five acres and built a home that is three bedrooms, two baths and three greatrooms. One for children to enjoy while they grew, the others for parents to create and relax, the third a kitchen that six people can fit into. Out side we have open area on both sides for a garden that we enjoy each year, and a shop to tinker in. It took a few years to call the house our home but now with a life of memories I cannot imagine home any where else. Good luck with your adventure and build a dream home for a family. j

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 4/08/2005 04:30:00 PM  

  • We built (after living in a 1920's fixer uppper for three years) a gorgeous "dream home". We lived there for only three years because we had overextended ourselves...we were living for our house. We didn't purchase curtains for most windows and never did get any covering at all for the back of the house. Everything was still white walls and there was very little decor -- too expensive. Eventually we moved into an existing house in the same neighborhood and...proceeded to guess what? remodel! But we could afford to do so...
    Moral of the story Make sure you can get out of your old place what you are putting in, so you have a decent downpayment..."they" say being house poor is the best kind of poor you can be (as your equity is always building) but from my perspective it sucked. We cuoldn't do what we wanted to to do in our spare time!

    By Blogger folason, at 4/21/2005 10:58:00 AM  

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