Good access to town, nice trees, affordable. I can walk to no fewer that FOUR Starbucks outlets (two proper stores, plus one in a Target and one in a Randall's grocery). It's hard to find a place in Houston that you can walk to anything, and during seven months of the year, it's too freaking hot to walk anywhere anyway, but at least I can walk to a Starbucks.
Back to the house. Three bedrooms, two baths, two car garage (sort of), formal dining (tiny), formal living (useless), a den with no good place to put a TV, and a galley kitchen with a door to the dining room, and a soffit that makes the small narrow kitchen positively cave-like and still manages to have a horrible traffic pattern. It also has a huge fire place in the den that hasn't been used in (we think) over 15 years. But wait, there's more! The AC is 15 years old (1994), it still works, but not much longer, the water heater is a huuuge tank from 1992, the windows are original single pane windows, they still work, but you would expect them to, you see, none of the windows on the front of the house open. By that, I don't mean they are stuck, I mean they never opened. A fixed pane of glass covering every hole in the front of the house.
Then, there are the "hardwood" floors. Actually, an engineered product that was glued to the floor. Supposedly, the glue they use serves as a moisture barrier to keep the floor happy. Not so in my little house. It started by reacting with the chair mat under my desk. Now, dark splotches are popping up everywhere. At least the berber carpet lived out it's expected life span.
So, it all really started with a simple idea that I would refinance to take advantage of the low interest rates. Currently, I have two notes, the 80% at 6.5% and the 15% at 8.5%. I've been paying the 15% piece off at a faster rate, and my total house payments are about $1,300/month. So, I looked at single note of only $671 per month. Wow, for me, that's cheap. So, what if I do it the other way? About how much house can I afford at roughly the same monthly payment? Doing the math backwards, I guess I can manage about $300,000 for a "new" house. Wow, that seems like a lot of house to me.
So, I could buy the house I want with a pool, and slightly better access to "town", a good room to use for my home office, and space to park in shade and use the garage for a woodworking shop. (side note: I am a crappy woodworker, but I have a lot of tools.) So, I jump over to the Houston Realtor site and start looking, and I keep looking, then look some more. In the meantime, I also start putting together all the stuff to do a refinance or buy a new house. But, I can't find anything that has what I want for anywhere near $300,000. I find several for $400,000 and $500,000, but there is no way I can bring myself to pay for that much house. So, I begin looking at adding on the things I want to my existing house, my guess is, I could get it by adding a floor. But the cost there is scary too, but still about $50,000 - $70,000 less than buying another house.
So, I finally have a brain storm. I will re-purpose and "fix" all the useless rooms into being what I want. Then, I don't have to add on square footage, I can modernize and update this house, which at 1,800 square feet is plenty big enough for one person (I feel guilty, because my neighbors have a family of four, plus a mother-in-law living in exactly the same house.) But still, sometimes, you want what you want.
So, in my head, the too-small dining room will be my new home office, with a window that open, and that I can look out of, even. The kitchen will get opened up by taking out the pantry, the door to the dining (new office) closed up, the oven and stove top will become a range creating a ton of new counter space. I'll sneak in a half bath where the laundry room is, and stack the washer dryer where a sliding glass door is. The brick fireplace becomes a french door letting in light to what is now the dining room.
Other big ticket items all get updated so that I can finance them as part of the house note rather than dying the death of a thousand cuts as each major thing dies in turn. New A/C goes in the attic, making room for a hall closet, new floors and carpet installed properly this time, new windows for much better insulation and sound proofing, a carport off the garage, and last but not least, a pool to drown myself in when this is all done.
Now, fast forward about three months. I choose a general contractor, UBuildIt because they say they can save me money, and I get control over how some of it is done, and hopefully, I'll learn a lot. The UBuildIt approach makes me the General Contractor, and they are sort of my paid "consultants." I've checked them out every way I can, and think it will get me slightly better materials at a better cost. Their best guess on getting the whole project done is about two months.
The financing took longer than I would have liked, but everything closed last Friday, the loan funded and I've started tearing stuff out. So, it's off to the races!
Worst case, I somehow FAIL miserably, lose a ton of money, and go bankrupt. Or, my company or job situation changes to the point I have to move. Best case is that I will get the house fixed up with everything it needs to last another forty years and at about the same amount of money (actually, about $28 less) that I am paying out now in mortgage payments.
Also, I already sunk a lot of money into this house. When I moved in, I added a proper master bathroom $14,000 (but the contractor screwed me, and it took 50 weeks). I've replaced all the wood exterior with Hardi plank. A new roof and decking went up. I've put up new fences, added about $7,000 worth of landscaping, pavers, and a new patio. After this, I'm done, I think. It will just be maintenance and replacement of normal worn out stuff, and whatever hobby level landscaping I feel like doing.
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