All the Stuff in the World...
With ravenrigan trying to move down here out of London, and looking for houses, I spent an idle sleepless night (thank you fibro and IBS combined!) looking at 4 bedroom houses in this area. I could move. But to get the size of house I want, I'd end up in one of those 1970's housing estates, or just round the corner from where we moved out of.
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Yes, by and by there would be a bigger sewing room, if I can still negotiate the stairs! It's unlikely that the neighbours moving will allow us to expand sideways: Mo moved a few months ago and her house sold for £240,000. No way will we ever raise that kind of money. By tidying ours up and replacing the windows, we could get the same and move into the boring type of 4 bedroom house in town. Bleah!
In the village we'd only get something smaller (that's what Mo has done: moved into a smaller house in the village, an ex council job), or something about the same size and vastly more expensive. I think there has been a total of 10 houses built within the village envelope in the last 25 years... Half of those are shared equity. We don't qualify for them. And they are about the same size as this one anyway.
As for gettng older... Yes, mortality bites, but Himself could be here another almost 40 years if his papa and grandpapa are anything to go by. Joe is 92 and still going, and his dad was 98 when he went. With a stair lift, that would be doable in this house. But getting the conversion done would also make this house much more saleable when the time comes...
Right now I'm just looking at surveys, outline plans, and quotes. Nothing else can be contemplated until the money is in the bank. But I need to know what is possible, what is sensible, and what is mere pie in the sky.
I'm not so sure about moving out... Little Sis managed to stay in her house during a far more radical (and traumatic!) bit of house surgery. They had all the internal walls lowered to get the head clearance in the upper floor, major wall shifting between the living room and the kitchen/dining room, and the insertion of a staircase. They did have the caravan, and used it as warm sitting space and kitchen area when they had several weeks without a kitchen due to the sacking of the builders...
Aesthetics no probs: there are dormers up on the row already, so I have a good idea what it would look like, and if it fits with them and the house, it'll be fine. I imagine using tiles that match the roof to finish the sides, and bricks that go with those we are built from for the front. And maybe we were lucky, but if Dan comes up with a decent estimate, and an accurate time scale, as he did for the conservatory, we'll be on budget and on time. We only took the whole 8 weeks he estimated for that because the autumn weather scuppered a couple of them.
What we'd gain would be one decent sized double bedroom, a second bathroom, a storage room/box room, and an office. The dining room would come back into use rather than being covered in Himself's office crap, and we'd have easier access to the storage, so STUFF could go away more easily.
Right now, we're just starting the process.
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