When my wife and I started looking for houses, we both wanted something different.
She wanted something small and cozy, while I wanted lots of room for a music studio and a home office.
For too long I had to put up with cramped apartments where half of my belongings had to stay stowed away in a storage unit that I wasted hundreds of dollars on. To make matters even worse, I started working from home exclusively within the past four years and I hated having to work in a bedroom with no privacy or sense of focus that comes with being in an enclosed office from 9 to 5 everyday. In the end, my wishes prevailed when we found a three bedroom house that was well within our most liberal budget possible. It’s also in an amazing area that is just a few blocks down the road from a large freshwater lake. As much as I love having a bigger home, I have to admit that many of my wife’s reservations about getting a house of this size were completely warranted. Whenever we need to mop the tile floors and the carpet in the bedrooms, it’s a huge chore. I was spoiled having such a small area to clean when we lived in apartments. It’s also extremely wasteful with the money we spend on energy bills just heating and cooling this house. We manage to get through the summer okay with lots of fans and open windows whenever it’s below 90 degrees outside, but it’s hard to deal with the cold weather in the winter. The furnace that was installed in this house from day one was simply too small to handle the heating load. We swapped it out for a boiler system with zoned radiators throughout and we couldn’t be happier.