best laid plans, etc.

2005-09-12 - 9:36 a.m.

Oh dear, oh dear.

After 10 years of planning (and mostly procrastinating, really) we finally have a plan to expand our house, but according to the contractor it's going to cost way way more than we expected.

So we're sort of stumped.

We talked with a local realtor yesterday. (Rather alarming eyeshadow.) After looking at everything, her advice was: sell. We can get a lot of money for it (well, sort of a lot), but were we to put a lot more money into it, it would never recapture what we'd spent.

I don't completely trust her -- some of her figures didn't quite add up, and I think she'd be eager to sell our house and then sell us another one -- but her advice is something to think about.

So -- here are our options, as I see it.

Sell, and move to B**keley

  • Next year, N and M will both be at LUPS. It would be good for us to live in B**keley, which is where LUPS is.
  • It's possible we could afford it, although I worry about ending up there in a house smaller and actually more miserable than our current house.
  • I worry about the disruption. Everyone seems so settled this year -- I don't want to disturb that. The realtor wanted us to move out now and let her fix up our house and sell it by Thanksgiving!!! Half an hour's reflection made me realize that that's insane. We could, though, spend a year or even until Christmas getting ready.

Modify our plans and stay
Kevin would hate this, but actually, now that we've started getting rid of stuff we actually have more space than we'd thought. If we got rid of a lot of stuff, landscaped, painted and moved some furniture around, I think we'd be okay. We could even redo the kitchen in a small sort of way and that would help a lot. And we'd have to replace the deck. Kevin is very troubled by the only one bathroom problem, but actually I don't think any of the rest of us cares at all.

Do nothing
I think we'd all hate that, actually.

Modify a bit more than the option listed above, but less than our plans call for
Add a staircase down to the basement. Add a toilet down there, but don't excavate. Or excavate, but only one room.
This also seems feasible to me, but I think Kevin would hate it.


It's funny, though. I'm not sure what I want to do. We've lived so long not-in-B**keley that I don't know if I want to live there.
Also, we're comfortable in our little house. We all like it. We like our neighbors and our neighborhood and we're close to transit . . .

But -- it would be good to live where our kids go to school. A house in B. would be more valuable. We'd be closer to lots of other things, like the fancy grocery store and most of our friends.

Hmmm.

I'm calling another realtor today to see about our options in B. If we can really only buy a yucky house in a bad neighborhood in B that's not so appealing.

I'd also like to spend the year in our present house at least, because Maddy's got this last year at a school one mile away, and that's nice for her.

Hmmm.

out of print - new releases

find me! - 2008-02-12
where I've gone - 2008-02-07
Where I've gone - 2008-02-05
where I've gone - 2008-02-01
New - 2008-02-01

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