Staying Put

We have had a change of heart - we have decided to try staying in our home for at least another year to see if we can make it work long-term.  Yes, it is short one bedroom that would be a lot better but - after seeing several properties we realized all we have already:  a great quiet lot on a good safe street (keyhole) with low traffic.  Lots of privacy in the back yard due to high cedar trees.  Fenced for the dog, well maintained home.  9 Foot ceilings in every room and 10 foot ceilings in the living room.  Open concept.  Lots of windows.   Natural gas as a secondary source of heat.  A patio off the kitchen.  Great neighbors.  Good walking trails nearby for walking the dog.  Close to our condo where Mom lives.  Plus all the upgrades we've already done - we live in a pretty nice home.


Those are all huge factors - so instead of buying another home, paying over $30,000 in closing costs, moving fees, property transfer tax, interest, notary fees and realtor fees, we are going to invest a bit more in our home to try and make it work. That doesn't even count the $150-200,000 more we would have to pay for a decent 4 bed home on a flat lot of similar size to what we have.   Fortunately the market keeps appreciating so any additional money we put into it  even if we sell down the road we will get out.  I love our house and hope to stay but we will have to wait and see.

After making this decision on Friday we made a list of things that we liked in other homes we saw that would improve our life here:

1.  More above ground outdoor storage.  We bought a horizontal storage shed from Costco on Monday  to store our shovels, pots and lawn mower.  It is sitting in a gigantic box in the garage right now - a project for this weekend.  It was on sale, $150 lower than the ones we saw online and I was there buying medication so called hubby and the deal was done.  Our small storage shed is full and so was the storage available in the garage.  Yes, we have a huge crawl space under the house but it is only good for items that you can put in a bin easily as is difficult to get out otherwise.  Those things like second sets of tires for both vehicles, lawn equipment etc need somewhere to live.  They actually had another deck box for $150 which I am thinking of also buying - I could store all my pots/gardening stuff in there over the winter and keep it out of the garage.

Costco horizontal shed we bought

2. New carpet in all 3 bedrooms.  Ours is dingy and due to it being a low grade builders grade carpet it has stretched over time and has several wrinkles.  We intend to do this upgrade in 2-3 months.  That alone will likely make our house feel like new.  We have thought about this in the past but removing all furniture from the 3 rooms at once and shutting down the business for a few days just seemed like too big of hassle - so we have lived with the dingy carpet.  This time round we will pay for good quality carpet in a dog friendly colour like grey.

3.  Better storage inside.  We have a utility room that has our washer and dryer, metal mesh shelving, minifridge, freezer and a utility sink which we bathe  Buddy in.  All the houses we looked at had no utility sink.  All the storage is open and it totally drives us crazy, never looks neat and tidy.  We will be investing in a custom cabinet that is quite deep (around 3 feet) to store extra items for our business, extra food I stockpile and laundry detergent.  Most of the homes we saw had cabinets in the laundry room and it makes so much sense.  Ours is right off our kitchen which is why I store stockpiled food there.  On the other wall we have more of the same kind of shelving, we will likely leave that alone and just store bigger items like our cooler there.  I also am on the hunt for storage boxes for our walk-in closet.  It is full to bursting so I need to figure out a way to make it work.  Putting our luggage back under the house will help but storage boxes would definitely tidy things up too.

real life - no staging - what my laundry area where cabinets will go looks like today (lol laundry and all)

4.  A real guest bedroom.  We will change the existing 3rd multi use bedroom into an actual spare bedroom instead of having a fold out couch for our guests.  The kids are adults and they and their spouses visit at least once or twice a year and it would be so much nicer.  We will move our existing bedroom furniture to that room to make this happen.  It is not super high quality and is starting to show wear after 7 years of use but will make perfect spare bedroom furniture.  We will likely also be able to keep our treadmill in there.  The weight set will move to the office, there is room enough for it there.

5.  New bedroom furniture for our bedroom - hubby has wanted a king size bed forever, not sure why we didn't get one when we moved here but now we will be getting new furniture and a king size bed.  We couldn't get that due to headboard size of our existing set so this should make him happy.  This will occur after the carpet is changed.

6.  Remove rhodos from back yard and extend our patio by about 10 feet.  We really want a bigger patio.  This will likely happen next summer - if we are committed to staying longer term.  The rhododendruns are overtaking our back yard and really only bloom for about 3 weeks a year.  The prior owner put them in a weird spot off-center in the yard.  We want a bigger patio to put perhaps a table and chairs for outdoor eating or lounge chairs with an umbrella.  The current patio is too small for that.

patio in summer

The offending rhodos and our cedars when they were smaller taken in 2013

Buddy this morning and our now very tall cedars almost 3 feet over top of the fence giving us lots of privacy

7.  Repaint the rest of the open concept living/dining/kitchen/hall.  We did one wall to get it prepped for sale.  This past weekend after making the decision to stay we did 3 more walls.  We are a third of the way there.  This is a huge job and one we thought we would hire out for but since we are sticking with the original colour and you can't seem to see where we stopped and started other than the fact is looks so much better we can do this job slowly.   Good house paint is ridiculously stupid in price (ours was $122 per can) so it makes so much more sense to keep the house the same colour and only have to do one coat.  If we choose to add some colour somewhere we will repaint the bedroom.  You used to be able to say paint doesn't cost much but it does now.  Some of the homes we looked at had terrible paint choices, one of them had at least 6 different colours.

Yes, all the above items cost money and time.  But moving and then changing a bunch of stuff would cost far more and we still might not end up happy so for now, the little island pad is home sweet home.