30 Days of Me: Day 15 – your dream house

Oh boy!  I love thinking about my dream house.  As a teenager, I used to design houses all the time, and if not for all the math involved, I might have even become an architect. 

I actually live in a house now that is about as perfect as a pre-made house could have been for Bill and me.  When we were looking at houses, my realtor, the ever patient and fantastic Pat, showed me over 100 houses (yes, really).  I loved it.  I love househunting!  Anyway, we had these very specific criteria: 

A music/man room for Bill so he could be messy and loud there and not bother me
A craft room for me so I could be messy and crafty and not bother him
Enough bedrooms for potentially 2 children and a guest room (that would be 4+ bedrooms)
A garage or storage area of some kind
Enough room for all our crap stuff
Not on a slab (a slab foundation is a big slab of concrete with no crawl space.  Very bad if your plumbing goes out.  Guess how they get to it?  Oh yeah, they jackhammer your floor.  No thank you!)
A yard of decent size
Location

Well, we found a pretty good number of houses that came close, and finally it was time to pick.  We really liked this one but the owners wouldn't come down enough in their price for us, so we were set to buy this other house.  What do you know, we got this one! 

It has a non-open floor plan, which we needed in order to get a music/craft room.  When you walk in, there's the staircase right in front of you; living room to the left (doesn't lead anywhere), hall to the right, and dining room right off it there at the front of the house.  The hall and dining room both lead to the kitchen, which has a half bath off it and Bill's music room, which is technically a den.  Off the kitchen is the laundry room, which leads to a garage one way and the screened porch the other way.  Upstairs there are 5 big bedrooms.  The first one you come to is one of the smallest and is my craft room.  I picked it because of the closet and how light it was.  Next is a bathroom, Karina's old nursery (before we moved her to her new room), a hallway leading to our large master, Karina's bedroom, and the room David's using, which is the largest of the non-master bedrooms.  Our master bedroom is huge, and takes up all the space over the garage and laundry room.  There's a walk in closet (mine!) and a bathroom with an extra vanity outside the bathroom (mine!).  Bill's got two small closets in the hall that leads to our bedroom.  It's perfect for us because my stuff fills the closet in our room, and he works, so when he gets up before me (oh wait.  That doesn't happen any more!) he could get dressed without waking me.  Anyway, even though he doesn't get up first anymore, it still works for us.  So we got pretty much everything we wanted.  I love this house.

Now, what would make it a dream house?  Well, first I'd move Bill's music room further from the living areas of the house.  He really likes to ruin his hearing by playing his music really, really loud, and he can't because I don't let him.  If he had a room off the garage instead, he could have his music a little louder.  My craft room would be a lot bigger.  We'd have a 2 car garage instead of a 1 car.  And the screened porch would be in better shape.  And have a fan.  Better appliances in the kitchen.  Oh, and two last things:  there would be an older tree for climbing in the yard and there would be a clothesline.

Other than those fairly minor things, I really love my house.  I guess I have my dream house in a way.  Lucky me!