My wife came home from work on Tuesday with the architect’s drawing. Over the last few years, I have sketched that part of the house many times trying to fit in what I thought were the crucial elements. We want a decent sized laundry, a comfortable bathroom with a large vanity for storage, and a bedroom with a lot of closet space. I was never able to fit all these elements into the space and figured that we would have to compromise on something. I expected the architect would help us determine what compromises to make in order for the space to work. In other words, I said “this is what we would like to see” and expected him to come back with “you can’t do that because of ‘y’ but you can do this instead….”
Expectations exceeded
I expected my grandiose wish list to be severely downsized by reality. It wasn’t. The architect’s first drawing gives us our bedroom with a walk-in closet (something I had never considered), a bathroom with a massage tub and a 7 foot double vanity and a laundry room with a laundry tub and closet space. The bedroom has a small dressing area where we could fit more storage if necessary, but the idea of lots of closet space was to eliminate the need for a dresser. From the dressing area, we have access to the walk in closet and a secondary entrance to the bathroom. There is even another door at the back of the closet (turning it into more of a closet hallway) leading into the laundry room– the ultimate in convenience. The laundry is also accessed from a new entrance from the back door.
Remember Powell Motors?
All this reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons –if you know me long enough, you will realize virtually everything will remind me of something on The Simpsons– when Homer designed a car for his long lost half-brother’s car company.
The Homer
It had every possible feature that Homer could dream up but the final price tag was so high that it caused Powell Motors to go bankrupt.
That is our current dilemma. Everything looks good on paper, but at what cost? That was the question I posed to the architect when I met with him on Friday. He said he would see the contractor later that day and would have some numbers for us early next week. What those numbers are will determine how we proceed. After all, we would also like to do the kitchen at the same time (no plans drawn up for that yet) and still have some cash left over to put towards the addition in a couple of years. And we simply can’t ignore the current economy. We want to have money in the bank, just in case.