About The House

In November of 2007, when I was many months pregnant with our second daughter, and days before Thanksgiving, we moved. We decided we wanted a newer, bigger house: that is, a house built in 1912, rather than 1909, and with four-ish bedrooms, rather than two. A little more room for the girls, the adults, the two cats, and a Great Dane. [And for the record, when I say we wanted a newer, bigger house, I mean I.] Bob most certainly did not want to move, but his request was that we not leave our neighbors, so we moved four doors down the street.

The "new" house needed lots of work, and our immediate plan was this: new air conditioning, new electrical service and wiring, repairing the plaster upstairs and down... I think there was more to this list, but I've forgotten. Having now lived here for 8+ months, we realize that pretty much everything that a house could need, this house needs. What would we do if we had unlimited funds?

• Brand new, top-of-the-line kitchen (or, at the very least, maybe some cabinets and countertops??)


• New plumbing, including clearing the drains in the basement and installing an outside plumbing clean-out


• New roof, decking over the old built-in gutters, and attaching new gutters -- wait, no... if Bob had his way, and we had unlimited funds, he'd restore the built-in gutters and put on a metal standing-seam roof on the house, porch, and garage


• Have two functioning bathrooms, plus a laundry room


• Water-proof the basement


• Repair the soffits, thus preventing birds (and worse???) from entering the attic


• Refinish the hardwood floors


• Install a permanent showerhead in the upstairs bathroom, rather than a shower wand with no place to "park" it... it just hangs there


• Install nice light fixtures in all rooms


• Install ceiling fans in the upstairs bedrooms


• Bushwhack the yard and start over


• Oh, insulate the whole house! (There's no insulation.)


• Install storm windows, screens on all the windows, or maybe replace the windows? If not, then restore the sash cords/weights, etc. so that the windows stay open.

I could go on. If you have an old house, then you understand.

Now, having said all that, I LOVE THIS HOUSE. It met all my criteria, and it was in bad enough shape that we could afford it. And Bob loves it, too, now, though he loses sleep at night over how in the world we'll ever be able to fix everything.