Should I or Shouldn’t I?

“Let’s at least figure out what it might cost”

And so the perilous journey began…

Sitting at the dining room table with my wife, we had gone back and forth on what to do with our house.

We bought it as soon as I had the two years of self employment history to qualify for a mortgage, and it was a stretch! The stress of not knowing if it would actually work, then the lender telling me that I would have to pay my tax bill before we could close on the house, in a word…

STRESSFUL

But a 1600 sq ft house built in 1956 with 3 bedrooms gets a lot smaller as a family expands from 5 to 6. And then smaller still as the little ones keep growing!

Should we figure out if we could put an addition on the back of the carport?

Should we look at moving?

Should we just stick it out for another 10 years and just do the best we could with teenagers in such tight spaces?

It was one of those houses that when we first walked in it, we knew it was the house for us. We loved it and really wanted to stay!

But…something had to change. In a 60+ year old house, there were issues. HVAC was old, water damage under the bathrooms, ductwork basically shot.

You know, the usual.

We talked with my cousin, a contractor who specializes in remodels and custom building.

And we realized that it would be about $200k to get an additional 1000 sq ft.

Also, we would lose a lot of the use of half the house while construction was happening!

Hard pass.

We kept gathering information. And gathering more information.

Analysis paralysis, I think they call it.

It was Friday night after the kids had finally fallen asleep, 9:13pm, to be exact.

Kidding…I have no idea the exact day/time when we decided what to do.

But I remember why we decided what we did.

The reality of life is that the future is unknown. We plan and hope for certain outcomes and results, but it’s not guaranteed. If we built an addition for $100k+, it could happen that something would make us move, and we would have overbuilt. If we just moved, where would we go? We loved the neighborhood, the house, it was home.

Then we realized the option that we had for both possibilities. If we did some renovations and updates on all the bathrooms, and then replaced the HVAC, we would have an absolutely wonderful home for years to come. And if something happened that gave us reason to move, even if we couldn’t recoup all the cost of updating and repairs, we would have had some wonderful space to enjoy life in.

So we decided to keep things simple. No fancy addition, just focus on what already had in the house. Repair damaged spots, and get a really nice place to take a shower. And toilet. Nice toilets!

And by simple, I mean it took 3 months to get the 2.5 bathrooms torn apart, damage repaired, and then put back together and remodeled.

I have to give serious credit to Jennings, Martin, Todd, and Adam for all the amazing work they did!

Once we made the decision, we never looked back. We had all the information for the options and we knew that decision was the best one for us.

We were grateful to stay at my Aunt Stanley’s (yes…AUNT Stanley) house until we had at least one working toilet and shower again. But it’s not easy to live somewhere that’s not home for that long.

Even with the trials and difficulties, we knew we had made the right decision.

Beautiful bathrooms, and (for me) no more ongoing damage to the subfloor or crawl space!

It was worth all the debate and agony in the decision making process.

When you are in the midst of debating the right path, make sure you have all the information you need. Then go for it!

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p.s. Of course, the following year…we moved…and that’s a whole other story.