Why not move?

A logical question many people asked us (especially our realtor) was why go through all this hassle of renovating? Why not find a house that already has everything you want and move?

The answer is that we found ourselves becoming increasingly picky. We loved our neighborhood and we loved much about our house. We weren't willing to go through the expense and hassle of moving unless we were certain it would be a meaningful improvement. This meant finding a house that (a) had every single one of the desirable features we liked about our current house, and (b) none of the undesirable features.

This was not easy to do.

So we kept our eye on the house ads, browsed the multiple listing website for possibilities, and went to open houses whenever something popped up on the market in our neighborhood. The snag is that every house we encountered had some significant flaw. The street was too busy. The driveway was sloped. (Jonathan had an anathema for sloping driveways. He was sure the kids would lose control of their bikes, rush into traffic, and be killed.) The kitchen lacked a walk-in pantry. (Our current house has a large walk-in pantry, which I absolutely love and refuse to be without again.) The house next door had a loud barking dog. It didn't have a good room for my piano. (Pianos need to be located away from direct sunlight, fireplaces, kitchens, or heating/ac vents.)

I realized the odds of us finding a house on the market that we would want enough to move into were very small when we attended a few open houses of some extremely expensive homes ($1.5-$1.8 million!) and found ourselves concluding that we still liked our current house better, flaws and all.

The closest we came was a house we found for sale just a few weeks ago, right when we were approaching the final decision to proceed with the renovation and I started having some cold feet about all the hassle involved. This other house was hugely expensive ($1.5 million) and farther away, maybe no longer in walking distance for Jon. It had a contemporary, open floor-plan look, with wood beams and stone walls. Gorgeous kitchen and first floor master. We actually went to look at it twice, raising our realtor's hopes cruelly, but ultimately decided against it for a variety of reasons. (On my part, because the garage was on the basement level, and I did not like the idea of having to carry groceries upstairs the rest of my life; on Jon's part, because it "just didn't grab" him enough to be worth the cost.) The realtor, and our children (who were excited by the fact that it had an inground pool), were quite disappointed, but we decided to pass on it.

So then the question became, why not just build from scratch? An obvious reason is that we were determined to stay in our general neighborhood, where there are simply no empty building lots. (Well, there is one, but it is overpriced and not desirable... it wasn't level, so we would run into the sloping driveway problem again, and it was on a stretch of road that got a lot more traffic than we currently get.) That would leave us only with the tear-down option. Which is, actually, a feasible option. The houses in our neighborhood are somewhat mixed, consisting of smaller homes built in the 1950s-1970s with small bedrooms etc., and larger, very expensive homes either renovated or built later on.

So whenever a small, (relatively) cheaper house in our area would go on the market, I'd run to Jonathan and say "there's a tear-down for sale on XX street! Let's go buy it!" Invariably what would happen is that we would go look at it, conclude that $350,000 or whatever they were asking for it was Way Too Much for a tear-down, and decide to wait for them to come down on the price. And invariably the house would sell within a week and some other lucky folks with a big mortgage would get to do the tear-down. Or, we would go look at it and conclude that the lot was too small, the driveway area too sloping, or neighboring houses occupied by too many yipping dogs.