House Wish List

When we first looked at this house, we knew that it was nearly perfect.  No house really is *perfect*, but it was as close as we were going to get without building it ourselves.  It had enough bedrooms, bathrooms, and closet space, and the bonus space I needed for my sewing room and an extra bay in the garage for Kelly's shop.  It was also in a great neighborhood, had a yard large enough for our needs (no dog and no real intention of gardening, but enough backyard for the kids to play), and not on a busy street or under power lines.  It was also a short drive to Kelly's workplace and didn't require him to get on the interstate to get there.  There were few things it didn't have from our checklist when house hunting.  We were happy enough to have found such a place that was immediately available, even though it was at the top of our budget.  We haven't done much to personalize it since moving in--the carpets, wall colors, and even the window coverings are all what was there when we moved in.  The only major changes we've made is replacing a couple of windows in Emma's room and the countertops in the kitchen.  We have lots of great plans for the house, none of which we can really afford at this time.  Here's a few things I'd like to do.

1.  Front staircase:

This is the way it looks now.  And yes, I cleaned up a bit around it to make it photo-ready.  You should see the pile of ill-fitting shoes that need to be donated that are just out of view.  Nothing like photographing your house to clean up one corner at a time.  I always liked that the opening of the staircase wasn't pointing directly at the front door (I think there's a fung shui thing about this).  However, what we have just seems sort of...plain.  I knew it could be easily gussied up with the right design.  

This is what I found.  I took one look at this and said, WOW!  This would look so nice and really give our "Craftsman Style" house a much more period feel.  Yeah, our house was built in the late 90s, but it's listed as a "Craftsman Style" in the description of the property--probably why I liked it so much was that the layout was so comfortable like an old Craftsman house.  I love the pillars with all the detailing and the lovely natural wood.  The paint on our railings are chipping and peeling so eventually I will have to touch it up or replace it.  I also love the door on this side of the stairs for storage.  Not sure if it's worth moving the doorway from the dining room to the front room--of course, we have bookcases in front of that area now anyway.  

2.  Hardwood floors:

Of course, we will be including hardwood floors throughout, upstairs & down, and on the stairs--the carpet is the same age as the house, and from what I understand, carpet generally lasts about five years and we're up beyond 12 now.  I've been scoping out flooring options online, wondering if I could do it myself or if I should hire it out.  I estimate that it's going to cost upwards of $5000 to get it done using some inexpensive hardwood (not laminate), and that includes upstairs and down.  With the lung issues that my kids are having, the more we can do to reduce allergens, the better.

3.  Kids' Bathroom:

The kids' bathroom has had some flooding issues.  The bathtub was filled to the brim and then they played Storm at Sea and saturated the floor.  The water swelled the caulking from previous storms, so it leaked down into the floor, into the space below and started pouring out the dining room below, setting off the smoke detector.  The drywall on the ceiling below is damaged as is all the cardboard-like trim around the edges of the bathroom.  We would like to put in heated tile floors and trim to avoid future floods and make it as comfortable as possible for the little tootsies that touch the floor.

We'd also like to put a window in that bathroom--something really small--just enough to open to let some steam out.  The bathroom fan is not working very well--I don't know if there's a blockage, or if the fan isn't strong enough for the space, or if it's just broken, but it's not sucking the steam out after the long, hot showers.  A window that can open would certainly help a lot, but we also need to replace the fan.

4.  Downstairs bathroom:

Due to some minor flooding (toilet overflowing) and not being aware of it for some time (child closed the door and failed to mention it to me), the wood floors warped.  I'd like to replace this with tile as well.

5.  Fireplace:

Our fireplace is a little odd--it's in the corner of the room.  Not sure why they decided to do this in the design, and it's not something you can easily fix without re-routing all the vents and things, so I guess we'll have to take this weird design choice and run with it.  The surround looks very similar to this one, except mine is painted white, of course, and they put large white tiles around it instead of these smaller, more colorful ones.  I love this look, especially with the natural wood.  I'd love to update (or back-date?) my fireplace with this type of tile and the lovely blue and orange slate ones on the floor.  It's a gas fireplace, so there's not any worry about making it fire-proof or worry about sparks hitting the floor, but if we're making changes to the floors anyway...


6.  Laundry room:

Right now we don't have a room, so much, as a pass-through from the kitchen to the garage.  There's no place to store baskets of laundry as you process them from dirty to clean, no folding table, and at this time, no door to close to reduce noise.  The door was taken off the hinges to get our dining room table into the house as we moved in, and we realized that putting the door back would get in the way of anyone trying to DO laundry.  I can just see me now, shoving clothes into the washer and someone comes bursting through the door and pinches my hand in the washer.  We just left the door off, but I'd love to put in a pocket door here to cut down on the noise.

The bigger plan is to knock out the wall behind it and build a 10 x 15 (or larger) addition to make a real laundry ROOM.  Something with a folding table, cupboards, utility sink, ironing board--the works.  Kelly drew up the idea on SketchUp and even put in an attached, external shed for garden tools, and a crawl space access.  This is a biggie, so it's not likely going to happen, but if we win a small lottery, it's going in!

7.  Back porch:

The wood on the back porch is rotting and needs to be replaced.  We'd like to change the layout of the porch a little bit to make it easier to go out to the patio from the back door.  maybe something a bit wider and deeper, or maybe without railings--just steps going down in different directions to get to the water spigot, the swings, and the patio.  I'd also like to get some new doors on the back.  The slider doors are narrow and clunky, and the locking mechanism is fussy--you have to close it just right to get it to lock correctly.  I worry that eventually it's going to be insecure or that someone isn't going to lock it right and we'll have intruders...vampires or bigfoot or something.

8.  Front porch:

There's nothing really wrong with the front porch, but it's rather narrow and doesn't get used.  I'm wondering if there's some way to open it up a little to make it deeper, more welcoming, and make use of the space.  Soft cushions would help, but given our weather changes, I'm not sure what I'd do with them in the "off season".  Bag 'em up and put them in the garage?

The bushes out front are also pretty overgrown and need to be trimmed back.  I hate to kill perfectly good bushes, but if they're too big and still growing, I will need to get something that won't grow quite so tall.  Short shrubs.  There's a really big hydrangea at the end of the porch, rather than a rail and spindle barricade, to keep people from wandering through and maintains privacy for someone sitting and having a cuppa, but the bushes in the front make it almost like a fortress.

I'd also like to get the front door replaced with a door that has windows on it.  For security purposes, I'd like to be able to see who is at the door before unlocking it.  We have a peep hole, but like so many of them, it's placed so high up that I'd need a step stool to look out.

9.  Woodwork details:

Back inside the house, I'd like to replace all the crappy wood trim (that's actually some kind of fiber board that wrinkles when it gets wet, as you can see in the bathroom photo), and add ceiling boxes, wainscotting, and picture rails.  Simple little additions can add so much richness to the space.

10.  Appliances:

OK, so we got a new dishwasher a couple years ago, settling on white to match the existing appliances, and within a few short weeks, one of the kids fell on the door (while it was open, of course) and broke it.  It's still *on* and it still closes and works, but it requires a bit more brute force to close it and if you open the door a crack, it falls all the way open.  So you can't just open it a crack to allow the steam to escape, you have to let it open all the way and then walk around the door until the dishes are cooled down enough to handle them.  I asked about getting it repaired, and the guy at the store said that we'd have to replace the entire door, which costs almost as much as the dishwasher itself.  Figures.  The original microwave died, so we replaced that with a stainless microwave, thinking that we'd replace all the appliances with stainless as they died, so it doesn't match the other appliances--and of course, we thought, "why didn't we think about making the dishwasher stainless when we replaced that?"  The new microwave also acting up--it quits in the middle of cooking things, for no apparent reason.  Not sure what that's about.  Then Kelly picked up a small fridge for our milk and medicine since we never seem to have enough room in our regular fridge for food and medicine, especially when you're getting 90 days of medication for two kids and getting 4 to 6 gallons of milk at a time.  I didn't go with him to pick it out, and I was picturing something more like a wine fridge, but it arrived back at the house--black.  So now we have black appliances, white appliances, and stainless.  I hate the fridge--it's too narrow.  The oven is electric.  I'd love to be able to replace all of them with matching appliances and install gas in the kitchen.

So there it is.  The top ten stuff I'd do to my house if I had a lottery winner.  #11 would have been to put in fancy shelves in my sewing room.  I had looked at some ideas at IKEA and they had the Billy bookcases that might work well.  Again, more stuff I have to dream about.