Dragon V's Ramblings

I got to negotiate house stuff yesterday afternoon. We've tentatively come to an agreement (verbally) but until all contracts are signed it's not set in stone... Still though, barring any last minute maneuvering by the other buyers, it looks like I am thiiiiiis close to having the house.... Hopefully I'll get to sign a counter-offer sometime today to make it official. All things considered, I ended up fairly close to what I was hoping to pay, a little higher, but nothing unbearable.

Predictably, I'm not sleeping well tonight.

So here you go. This is the house in question:



The picture is from an online real estate listing. It's not great, but it gives you a rough idea of what the house looks like. I was thinking of going by and taking pictures of the house, but I don't want to look like I'm stalking the house :). Once things are signed, I'll see if I can get in before closing to do some measuring and take some pictures.

In the meantime, I AutoCaded a bit. Based on what I could remember from my tour of the house, I drew up the following rough sketches of the first and second floors. The proportions of the rooms are fairly close to reality, but I'm likely off a bit on a few things that I couldn't quite remember exactly.

The First Floor - At the bottom is the huge front porch and entry. The big room up from that is the living room with fireplace and partially built-in bookcases. I'll probably tear those out and build in something nicer, the ones there right now are in poor shape. Then you have stairs going up, door to basement, poorly laid out kitchen, huge dining room and finally the back porch/addition with a half bath. I don't see doing too many changes to most of the first floor, except for re-arranging the kitchen, porch, and half bath into a more coherent unit. Right now they look like they were slapped together (which they were). One really nice feature of the first floor is how the entry, living room, and dining room are connected by fairly huge French doors. It's a neat old fashioned look but actually it's very open.

The Second Floor - Four bedrooms, 2 full baths, and a really big hallway/landing space between them all. Right now, my plan would be to take over the front two bedrooms with adjoining bathroom as a pseudo Master suite and possibly rent out one or two of back bedrooms. This is contingent on what my finances look like though. I don't think i got the angles on the diagonal walls, but that space looks really neat. One thing that I had thought about possibly doing is putting in an old fashioned skylight over the center space. It's big enough to accommodate a fairly large one, but I'd have to see what my attic is like as well as how energy efficient the house is or isn't.

I was hoping to also draw up the basement, but I didn't get a good enough look at it to accurately judge sizes or rooms etc... I'm pretty good at estimating measurements like that visually, but we saw it by the light of my mag-light because we couldn't find the light switches. It's about half finished and I intend to do some serious work to it. It's probably going to end up being the most different space in the house once I'm done with it (sometime in the next decade probably ;).

So there you go. Wish me luck in getting things set in stone sometime today so that I can get back to a semi-normal sleep schedule :)