House stuffs

So I have an extra long weekend. It's Columbus Day weekend here in Mass and I'm taking today off to square off the three days. It's nice to have a bit of a rest. I've been feeling a bit out of it. Maybe allergies. Maybe a low grade cold. Janna's starting to feel less than optimal as well. Today should be good. I'm making a slow cooked pot roast with tomato and chourico sauce. It's keeping the house warm and it'll be a nice hearty meal with a lot of spice and garlic.

We're still contemplating different options for our house. We go all over the place, but our two big things are a pantry sunroom off the kitchen (not greenhouse sunroom, but just a room with normal walls and roof but all windows on three sides) and finishing half the basement into an office/playroom space.

The big thing is we don't want to end up with a basement room that we're not going to use because it's musty or nasty. We want a nice room that we will be able to use into the future on a regular basis. Particularly with a moist climate like cape that means fairly expensive construction to make sure it's sealed dry and a full time dehumidification system. We've also contemplated radiant floor heating to make sure we don't have that cold floor feeling. 

We did figure out we can do a pantry addition without a zoning exemption. We are over the percentage allowed for a house on our lot, but apparently the town lets you have one free "overage" so you can go past the setbacks if your frontage and percentage covered are ok, or you can go past the frontage if your setbacks and coverage are ok, and in our case, we can go past the percentage covered as long as we stay within setbacks and frontage which works out fine for us. We'll still need to run it past the hysterical commission even though our subdivision was created in 1978 since half our town is designated a fake histerical district.

The big thing for us is how much we want to put into the place and what it gets us. But even with a very mild upgrade in buying a new house, we'd be talking about more money than our additions are likely to cost. And neither of our ideas, the basement or the sunroom/pantry are likely to be too horrible in terms of construction. Meaning, they have people wandering in and out and they're loud and all that, but we don't have to really abandon the house as it is now.

I am still having a lot of moments of sadness about not being able to go forward with the house we were getting. Just every once in a while I'll think "well it'll be nice when we have a bigger kitchen" or "it will be great when Nora can go over and look at the chickens next door" or something along those lines. It's certainly not that we regret backing off from the purchase because it had reached a point we couldn't afford. But we'd put a lot of energy into our plans for the place.

House stuffs

So I have an extra long weekend. It's Columbus Day weekend here in Mass and I'm taking today off to square off the three days. It's nice to have a bit of a rest. I've been feeling a bit out of it. Maybe allergies. Maybe a low grade cold. Janna's starting to feel less than optimal as well. Today should be good. I'm making a slow cooked pot roast with tomato and chourico sauce. It's keeping the house warm and it'll be a nice hearty meal with a lot of spice and garlic.

We're still contemplating different options for our house. We go all over the place, but our two big things are a pantry sunroom off the kitchen (not greenhouse sunroom, but just a room with normal walls and roof but all windows on three sides) and finishing half the basement into an office/playroom space.

The big thing is we don't want to end up with a basement room that we're not going to use because it's musty or nasty. We want a nice room that we will be able to use into the future on a regular basis. Particularly with a moist climate like cape that means fairly expensive construction to make sure it's sealed dry and a full time dehumidification system. We've also contemplated radiant floor heating to make sure we don't have that cold floor feeling. 

We did figure out we can do a pantry addition without a zoning exemption. We are over the percentage allowed for a house on our lot, but apparently the town lets you have one free "overage" so you can go past the setbacks if your frontage and percentage covered are ok, or you can go past the frontage if your setbacks and coverage are ok, and in our case, we can go past the percentage covered as long as we stay within setbacks and frontage which works out fine for us. We'll still need to run it past the hysterical commission even though our subdivision was created in 1978 since half our town is designated a fake histerical district.

The big thing for us is how much we want to put into the place and what it gets us. But even with a very mild upgrade in buying a new house, we'd be talking about more money than our additions are likely to cost. And neither of our ideas, the basement or the sunroom/pantry are likely to be too horrible in terms of construction. Meaning, they have people wandering in and out and they're loud and all that, but we don't have to really abandon the house as it is now.

I am still having a lot of moments of sadness about not being able to go forward with the house we were getting. Just every once in a while I'll think "well it'll be nice when we have a bigger kitchen" or "it will be great when Nora can go over and look at the chickens next door" or something along those lines. It's certainly not that we regret backing off from the purchase because it had reached a point we couldn't afford. But we'd put a lot of energy into our plans for the place.