My House - I Love My House

And it's really a nothing special house. It was sort of a track-home in a nice neighborhood. You know the saying - don't buy the most expensive house in a crappy neighborhood, but buy the cheapest house in an expensive neighborhood ... that's kind of what I did. Initially the house was a 3 bedroom-2 bath-one floor very plain but open design 1550 square foot home. It's probably one of the smallest homes in the neighborhood, and one of the most plain homes - at least it was!

That was in 1999.

Since 1999 I've made some major changes. First thing was finishing out 3/4 of the attic and adding 400 sq ft of living space - one big open family room and a half bath with a beautiful wooden spiral staircase that leads to the upstairs space. However, lesson learned about using a contractor that might not know what the heck he's doing ... the job took 6 months and I had to call and fight every step of the way to get the contractor and his workers to my house to do the job - 6 months was waaaay too long for this job. Also, the top of spiral staircase met up with the slant of the roof so there was only about 5 feet of clearance space - you had to really duck and almost crawl to get into the space - this is definitely a major design flaw that the contractor should have warned me about so we could look at placing the spiral staircase somewhere else or doing a totally different stair design. After some haggling-fighting-threatening-nagging the contractor did add a dormer over the spiral staircase that corrected the problem and actually added a lovely additional window and look to the space. That contractor has since gone out of business ... doh! The spiral staircase ... I love it - it is like a piece of art just hanging out in my house.

Then I added a sunroom onto the back of the house in the space where the little useless pre-fab "deck" used to be - that added 160 square feet of wonderful space and is a 3 season room although I use it all but maybe 30 days out of the year - yeah, it gets a little cool (okay COLD) in the winter but I still love it. I bought a portable A/C unit specifically for that space. Were I to do THAT over again I would upgrade my main A/C unit and have duct work run to the room. Again, the contractor that did that job should have suggested that because I was very vocal about how I wanted to use the room every single day. It's especially fabulous to be out there during a thunderstorm. And my cat thinks I had that space built just for him. Of course, he also thinks I had the spiral staircase built just for him.

I've also painted, added granite countertops in the kitchen, added a whole row of countertop space and cabinets in the kitchen with shelving over it, remodeled the master bath, redone all the landscaping, added a beautiful and large deck space off the sunroom and then added a pergola on the deck. I've repainted the front door and shutters from red to a blue color. Oh yeah, I removed the stupid cheap-o front door that came with the house and installed one with a large oval glass insert. I've changed out light fixtures and ceiling fans. I'm sure there are many other things I've done to the house to personalize it but those are the major things that come to mind.

There are still many things I'd like to do to my house - that saying, "House Done - Man Dies" scares me out of my wits! hahahaha I'd like to add crown moulding in the living room and hallway. I'd like to put down new flooring in my kitchen/dining area. I'd like to rip up the only carpet that remains in the house (the bedrooms) and put down wood floors. I'd like to remodel the 2nd main floor bathroom into something a bit trendier (I'm formulating a plan for that now). I'm getting a bit tired of the paint color so I'd like to repaint. Whenever my son is out on his own and totally moves out, I'd like to reclaim the upstairs space that is now his "man cave" and change it into a humongous craft and sewing room. I removed the door on the entry-way closet making that a more open space and mini-mudroom, which has just shown me that I now want to totally remove that little closet space and make the whole living room area open. And the "wants" and ideas just keep rolling.

But the house is soooo imprinted now with my style and the way I live, I cannot imagine living anywhere else. I've named it The Burrow because that is what it is to me. A safe and comfortable burrow that totally reflects my style - it's a space that I look forward to coming home to.