After owning our place for the last 4 years on the Middle Coast, we have started to revisit a plan we originally put on the “back burner” the last couple of years-adding on to our house.
It seems that most people who frequent our area of the MC, their houses are not out of Architectural Digest (there are houses up there like that, but we are not part of that crowd). The houses are always works in progress. Problem is, when you come up here the last thing you want to do is go work on the house, especially when you have kids that are too young to understand what remodelling means. We would love to do it ourselves, but no time.
Another realization we came to, we wanted to do some projects that were just outside our scope of expertise. So we hired an architect in St. Joseph to help us along the process. We wanted to add a couple of bedrooms (using an existing attached garage). We also wanted to add a screened-in porch so that the family could enjoy eating dinner outside in the summer time without worrying about West Nile virus after every bite.
After the downturn in the economy, we decided to put the plans on hold. Just a bit of advice for anyone that wants to buy a second home: Unless you decide to use your 2nd home for a vacation rental, don’t rush into creating your “dream retreat”. It should be a long-term endeavor. Get used to your place. Allow things to frustrate you, identify what parts of your house really make you feel relaxed. Then you can tweak/refine what you need. Then you have what you ultimately wanted.
Bottom line, we are at that point now. We have spent enough time up there to know what we want. We have poured over the plans and have refined them a bit. Now we have our game
plan. Now it comes down to what we want to spend.
So this is what the new project is. I will be creating a section of this blog to chronicle the life of a construction project that will be done remotely.
Let’s see what happens…
Walter
