I haven’t written in a while.
A very long while.
A lot has happened in our little house, since my last
writing. We now have club chairs. We have a wall of artwork in our stairwell.
We have a rug in our living room, and a table lamp, and all sorts of things
that were missing, as of my last post.
There are still no dining room chairs, however. It’s the
only excuse I have to get out of hosting Christmas and Thanksgiving. Hah!
We’ve had grand plans for the house, and intended to start
on them in February or March.
We were going to buy a king-size bed, so we could both sleep
comfortably. We were going to add lighting and a legit stair rail to the
stairs, so I wouldn’t repeat last year’s tumble and concussion, when the wall
of our landing “broke my fall” via my head. We were going to enclose and renovate
our master bedroom, which is currently open to the living room below, and
renovate the master bathroom, too, because it’s hideous. We were going to
enlarge our closets, because they’re tiny, useless cubby holes under a sloping
roof. We were going to take in some of the attic space and add a skylight so I
could have my own little study/migraine room for when I need to get up in the
night time, so I wouldn’t have to go down the stairs.
I had everything priced out, down to which knobs would be on
the kitchen cabinets, and which toilet seat we’d be opting for (one with a
built-in bidet), and which closet system we’d install.
Then my husband pointed out to me that the ceiling above our
kitchen – and below our master bathroom – seems to be sagging, at approximately
the location of the bathroom wall, above.
We decided to call an engineer, just to make sure everything
was okay before we proceeded with the renovation.
And all hell broke loose.
The floor joists supporting our master bedroom aren’t
sufficient to support… anything, really, except a ceiling. The structure above
the kitchen is messed up, somehow, but we won’t know exactly how unless we rip
out the ceiling in the kitchen. We need a beam across the opening between the
kitchen and the dining room, because whoever renovated back in the 1960s or
1970s tore out a bearing wall there, and didn’t put in a proper beam, so
there’s nothing supporting the exterior wall of our master bathroom, above.
(Hopefully, this makes sense to non-building professionals.)
TLDR: We’re screwed.
I brought in a contractor, anyway, to talk through what we
would have to do to renovate, and he informed me that we’d have to do the
kitchen and the master suite all at once, and the ceiling in our living room
would either have to drop, or we’d have to have exposed beams in the living
room.
We have 8’-5” ceilings (because construction in 1955 wasn’t
as standardized as it is today), and we’re talking dropping down to 7’-10”.
Nope.
I called another contractor to get his opinion, and his
opinion was vastly different. He said that a bank would be unlikely to loan us
the extra money for renovations that wouldn’t add square footage and possibly
wouldn’t get us the desired return on the house (a serious concern of mine). He
suggested ripping off the roof and the master bedroom altogether and just
building a second story. It would add about 600 square feet to the house, and
would vastly increase the value of the home.
But we don’t know if our foundation can support that much
weight, because adding walls AND a roof to a house that is obviously
under-engineered already is a terrible idea.
As an alternative, he suggested building a new
foundation off the back of the kitchen, expanding the kitchen and rebuilding
the screened porch, and building a new master suite over that, plus beefing up
the structure (which he said wouldn’t require beams and dropping the ceiling,
though the floor level of the upstairs would raise slightly, so there would be
a slightly lower ceiling upstairs). Our current master bedroom would become my
migraine room, and we’d go from being a 3-bedroom, 2-bath house to a 4-bedroom,
3-bath house, which would vastly increase its market value.
I suggested to my husband trying to sell for the value of
our current mortgage, and just buying a different house, rather than putting
$150,000+ into a renovation on this one, plus the cost of renting an apartment
for 6 months while the work is performed.
He wasn’t a fan of that idea.
After some discussions about the house, we’ve come to a
conclusion: Everything will be put on hold.
We don’t want to take out a loan for the entirety of the
cost of renovation and addition, so we’ll have to save up for a couple of years
to make that happen, regardless. We’re just going to wait and see. In two
years, when we’ve saved up the amount we hope for, we can decide if we really
want to invest more money in the house, or if we want to buy a newer patio home
somewhere nearby.
In the meantime, we’re buying an inexpensive platform bed
and a king-size mattress. We’re going to paint the master bedroom a cheerful
shade of white – it’s currently a hideous yellowish beige that’s dark and
depressing – and I took advantage of a bedding sale at Target to buy pretty and
affordable linens. We’ll install a stop-gap handrail and motion-sensor light in
the stairs so I won’t be in mortal peril going downstairs in the middle of the
night when I have a migraine and need to move to a different bed to writhe around in agony.
And I’ll try not to have a panic attack about the house, every
week. (I’m not exaggerating. The uncertainty of everything has been incredibly
stressful, for me. Hello, Klonopin!)
And we’ll live with the house we have.
For now.
For now.
