This old house

Must Haves (at least):
– 4 bedrooms
– 2.5 baths
– 2000 sq ft
– 2 car garage
– 0.5 acres
– Basement
– Master Suite w/ Large Walk in Closet & Large Bathroom (Dual vanity or enough space to add dual vanity)
– Large Kitchen or the ability to make it into a large kitchen
– Open floor plan or the ability to make it an open floor plan
– Workshop space (can be in basement or even detached building)

Would Like:
– 3 car garage
– 1-2 acres
– Separate Laundry Room w/ room for utility sink
– Garage to not face the street
– Gas stove
– Screened in porch or sunroom

Definitely Not:
– Split Level
– Bi Level
– On a busy street

Two of the biggest concerns with this house are going to eventually be our biggest projects.  Those are from the must haves list, where we currently don’t have a large kitchen or open floor plan, but we do have the ability to make it happen.  But, it’s going to be more costly than we initially imagined.

Let’s start with the floor plan. We wanted an open one.  Now, does that sound like a house hunters couple, or what?  I promise, we won’t be that annoying.  We know how to get over ugly paint and lack of stainless steel appliances… but I digress.  Houses built in this time frame were all about the separate kitchen, dining room, family room, and formal living room.  But, who uses a formal living room anymore?  It really just becomes a place to put furniture that you never really use and a pretty place to put your Christmas tree every December.

Well, this house had just that.  Here is the main floorfloor plan from our home tour page:

I’m perfectly fine with the separated dining room from the kitchen, as long as there is decent seating for informal meals in the kitchen.  But with Connor now in the picture and us being a couple that enjoys entertaining and having people over, we wanted the family room to feel connected to the kitchen.  And it does here, however, its such a small area.  With the fireplace and sliding glass door to go onto the deck, we can only really manage seating for a few people and the rest have to hang out in the kitchen or sit on the floor.

Next enters the living room. It’s conveniently located just next to the family room.  But a wall is in the way.  When I saw the setup when touring the house I immediately knew that the wall needed to come down.  If we did that, we could manage to extend the kitchen out into the family room and make that larger, too.

Here are the details on our current kitchen/family room setup:

And here is the goal:

It’s going to be so great.  It’s going to make the family room so much bigger.  It’s going to open up the dark foyer.  It’s going to let so much natural light in from the two front windows.  I can’t wait.

BUT attaining the goal involves a complete HVAC replacement, removal of a load bearing wall, and the installation of a very large beam. AKA $$$. (More details coming later).  The first goal was to have it complete before Connor arrived.  After annoying meetings with contractors and having to hustle them to give us a call back and estimates, we decided to push it off until this fall.  Fall flew by way too quickly and we knew we would never have it done by Connor’s first birthday.  So now our new goal is next spring, provided we can align the HVAC company, the engineering calculations, and find a decent contractor to work with the HVAC company…. We got this!…. I think…

We’ll keep you updated throughout the process 🙂