I’m not in any state to be seriously contemplating buying a house. Hell, I’m still saving up for the deposit on an apartment. But I have a continuously evolving vision of my dream house.
I’m on a big mid-century modern kick right now. I want a bathroom with blue tub, toilet, and sink and pink and blue tile. I look at pictures of 50s and 60s homes with tons and tons of built-ins and sigh in jealousy. I want to have a library / media room / guest room with storage space hidden behind a bookcase and a big old pile of pillows for reading and lounging on.
But right now I look at furniture with the thought of how heavy is it and will I be able to get it up stairs to a second floor apartment. sigh
All I can say is that my current house of 12 years has f$-kall to do with the house I dreamed of having when I was 25.
And the things I LOVE about this house were things I never considered:
4 car garage- it was a trivial addition to the mortgage.
Higher than normal island in the kitchen - a godsend for taller folks
Gas stove in the kitchen
Tile in the bathrooms - started out as carpet, had boys. Removed destroyed carpet for tile.
Extra power in the breaker box
A signalised intersection at the front of the development
Southern exposure to driveway (I shovel 1/3 the snow as my neighbors agross the street)
By the way, the first day I looked at houses when I was going to buy my first house, I cried. It’s heartbreaking how much real estate costs.
Right now I live in a fly mid-century modern with newly renovated IKEA kitchen and bathrooms. It’s pretty sweet… but there are always things you don’t have, in a house. I wish we had a real laundry room, a fourth bedroom, and no deer attacking the gardens.
I recently bought a house. It’s a very nice house, and I’m much happier and more comfortable there than in any other dwelling I’ve lived in since I was a child…but it’s not my dream home. It’s a compromise, because my dream home is an earth-sheltered place built to my specifications (which amount to “Bag End with modern tech”), and I would have to move so far out to build it that it just isn’t practical. I don’t foresee getting my hobbit hole until I retire, or at least get a job that allows me to telecommute exclusively.
So, even though I’m happy in my new place, I still look at pictures of other homes and sigh over them.
Gorgeous.
I’m a bit of a house nut. My husband and I have owned and renovated several, but my dream is to build our own, which I’ve been planning in various incarnations over the past 10 years. It’s been interesting to look back on my various designs and see how they’ve changed. The next time we move (husband is military) will hopefully be back to my home state, where we own a bunch of land, and we’ll be set to finally build.
It’s really been kind of great living in all these different houses, though, learning what works and what doesn’t. For instance, our current house (which is really quite lovely) has a GIANT master bedroom–seriously, almost 500 sf–and a tiny master bath with no bathtub. WTF. There is no real room to expand the bathroom which doesn’t completely eliminate the closet or screw up windows, so we put in a hot tub outside. Which is awesome! So much better than a bathtub! Seriously we use this thing almost every night: husband comes home, we eat dinner and have a drink or two in the hot tub, chat about our days, play grab-ass. Fabulous. Now the future house plans don’t include a tub in the master bath–we’ll just use the hot tub for soaking time. We’ve also realized living here that we’d prefer a smaller home (but bigger than the Japanese apartment, for sure).
Word. I learned that in my first house, which had three rooms that I almost never went into. What you want is a house in which every room is used almost every day, but that has enough room to accommodate all the things you want to do. The balance is somewhere between a bungalow and a McMansion.
My ideal house would have the following rooms:
A library/study/dining room
A kitchen that is sheltered from but open to the…
Great room, with a large table and a large seating area
A bedroom for us with an ensuite
A bedroom for each of the kids
A guest bedroom to entice grandparents to visit and babysit the kids
A full bath to service the bedrooms
A powder room
A spacious pantry/utility room, lots of storage shelves plus the laundry here
A sewing room for me
A workshop for my husband
Right now the only thing our house is missing is the pantry/utility room, but when baby #2 becomes a reality we’re going to lose our guest room. And grandparents will not want to visit. And there will be no comfortable place for one of us to escape when we’re having a Bad Baby Night. And I will cry.
My sewing room is a 6x9 closet and my husband’s workshop is the garage. No good way to house a guest bed or a child in either of those places.
I will never have the house of my dreams because at my age the next house in my future will be some type of retirement home. However, that doesn’t stop me from thinking about what I would want if I were younger and wealthier, both of which have an equal chance of happening.
Master bedroom big enough for a chair in which to read. Two master baths, not just one with double sinks. Two more bedrooms, each with its own bath. Three to four car garage. We don’t have three or four cars, but we have the snow blower and hoses and lots of crap. Lots and lots of built-ins, and lots of closets.
I don’t care about granite and stainless, but I like hardwood. A lot on the water. It doesn’t need to be huge, but I don’t want to hear the neighbors or smell their cooking. Southern exposure for the main living areas would be nice.
My husband and I built our own home 25 years ago. We made a clearing in the forest, I designed and drew the plans, pulled the permits, and my husband and I and a few friends/relatives built it together over the course of a couple years. We hired out bulldozing the pad and putting in the septic tank, and not much else.
It’s extremely empowering to build your own shelter. We did not have the whole skill set needed when we started, but we acquired it. I could write a book . . .
Our house is 1100 square feet, 2 bed 1 bath, with rough soft-plaster walls, saltillo tile and cork floors, true divided light wood windows, and knotty pine ceilings. There are things I would have done differently (hey, like finished it before we moved in). But it is basically the house I want. Very small for an American house. I’ve never felt it was too small for us. We have an entire spare room now that our daughter’s grown and gone.
We built the house we could afford, after saving up for it for a decade. It cost us $60,000 from start to finish, and we paid in cash. To us, not living in debt is paramount, and that meant a house just big enough for us and not a smidge bigger.
My uncle built his own house in the most extreme “DIY” I’ve ever seen. The house is 4000+ sf, state of the art, 2-story living room, massive curved staircase, the whole bit–and he did every speck of it himself, even down to cutting the 2x4s out of trees from his land. I think the only thing he hired out was the brick work on the exterior. Oooh! I have some pictures on this computer.
This staircase is steel with a wood veneer: all DIY. And the staircase going into the basement mirrors it. He cut all the railing himself out of bar stock.
Living room.He framed this house by himself. Blows my mind.
Anyway, it’s amazing. He built the whole thing for about $70K. Only catch is that it took 10 years. Fine line between genius and crazy, I guess.
My husband and I will be building ours ourselves, too, although not to that extreme. The studs will be pre-cut (slackers!), the design much smaller and simpler, cabinets will be Ikea rather than hand-built, and we’ll hire out a few parts, possibly including framing, which is the aspect we have the least experience in, and definitely including the drywall finishing. I hate finishing drywall. We will probably DIY the rest of it, though, and we’ll be building with cash, so it will be awesome. Can’t wait!
There’s a house near here on the bay. I think it’s Tudor but not obviously so, if you know what I mean. We haven’t driven by in quite awhile. It has a turret and thru the windows you can see row after row of books…
Fine line between genius and crazy, I guess.
