stupid houses

another sleepless night... i'm so ready for vacation. got up about an hour ago because i was tired of tossing & turning. i keep thinking about this house & i can't seem to turn it off. it's one that we saw last weekend & i was very much unimpressed by. it's small, has a bad layout, looks completely goofy on the outside & needs some serious updating (i.e. tear out the wood paneling & carpet, make a real kitchen, build a small addition on the kitchen...) so why do i keep thinking about it? many reasons, but mostly because i'm crazy. i've worked & reworked the floorplan for the past week. for some reason i think that dan & i could handle doing the majority of the work ourselves - which in theory is probably mostly true. but i admit, we're lazy people. he more motivated than i on our days off. i can't even be bothered to unpile the stacks of mail, newspaper, books & netflix videos from our kitchen table. nonetheless, i believe we are capable. that in & of itself is exciting to me. a project! but any house is a project, right? i mean, anything in our price range, which after today, i've realized is either very small (approx. 1000 square feet) and in need of updating, is a total piece of crap or some combination of the two. so it looks like our best bet would be to buy a small house. i can dig that. we don't need a lot of space.

this particular house though goofy on the outside & inside at the moment has potential. the houses across the street (same style) are very cute. with a small addition, it could have a very functional kitchen instead of a postage stamp. the house is on a corner lot on a quiet street. fairly low crime, compared to our current neighborhood. it's walking distance to the main street of shops, restaurants & stores. it's about half-way from both of our jobs. the neighboring houses seem to be in good condition, which is a plus. there's plenty of parking. oh, this house has a garage - it needs work, but it's a garage. the yard isn't as huge as other yards in the neighborhood but there's plenty of space for gardening & enjoying the outdoors. it has a front porch & back porch. the length of the house is facing south, so it would be fairly sunny. dry basement that dan can stand up it - pretty unusual for houses built in the '20s around here.

of course the whole place probably has no insulation, so we'd need to take that on or pay a bajillion dollars a year to heat & cool it. it's got oil radiators that i'd like to get rid of... um... oh yeah, someone started a fire on the back porch last week & burned a big hole in the back of it & ruining the porch. i know that seems terrible, but we wanted to make some changes to that wall anyway, so it doesnt seem like that huge of a deal. plus, we should be able to get it cheaper cuz it's got a black hole in it, right? that's what i keep thinking - except it's listed at an auction house & our realtor can't seem to get a hold of them. guess we'll just have to see what happens.

i can't wait to go on vacation & stop thinking about all this crap.