Contentment

We bought our house really quickly. We came here for one weekend two months before our move. We had 3 days to look and find something, and the next thing we knew we were signing a contract on a home. I was the one really pushing for buying immediately because I really didn't want to face the prospect of moving to an apt. and then moving again just a few months later.

Overall, I think we made a decent choice. There are things I really like about this house. It was a reasonable price. It has a gigantic yard. The previous owners took care of it fairly well (though they did have many indoor pets, which I'm not overly fond of...especially with carpet.) It's on a cul-de-sac (making it the best street in our neighborhood). I like that you can see the living room from the kitchen. It's only about a mile from Matt's work.

But there are a few things I have issues with.

Almost all of the homes we looked at here have a separate shower and tub in the master bathroom. There's a nice big tub and a glass enclosed shower on the end. At first that seemed handy. I think it could be for some people. You know, if one likes to take baths and the other likes to shower, you could both do so at the same time and not be in each other's way.

But I don't like taking baths. At all. Only on my most very sick and achy days does it even sound slightly appealing. Matt never takes baths either. Our bathtub has been used a grand total of two times in the last two and a half years. There are three unfortunate things about this. 1. The already limited space in our bathroom is not put to good use. 2. Though I shower daily, I hate our shower because it's a tiny cramped box squished on the side of the tub, and the water gets in my eyes because I can't back up in the shower. I HATE water in my eyes. 3. Our tub's heat regulator is busted because we haven't used it. Weird, I know. I didn't know that would happen either.

When I was at a friend's yesterday, she showed me what the previous owners of their house did with the bathtub/shower. They turned the shower into a linen closet (something we don't have in our house and another one of my issues) and added a shower to their nice big tub. That sounded fabulous to me! I don't know how much it would cost, but I totally want to look into it.

Another thing we've found difficult about this house is the lack of open wall space. There are a lot of windows, which is great. But between the windows and the fireplace, we really are very, very limited in furniture placement in our living room. Add to that mixture my piano and we're screwed. At the moment we're making it work. The one open wall in our living room has our piano and 20 in. TV squished together. It makes for a tight corner when rounding into the kitchen, but it works. We'd like to upgrade our TV at some point and actually have some sort of entertainment center with doors we can child proof. The only way I can see that working is if we somehow demo the fireplace. It's brick and juts out into the room. If we could take out the brick and replace it with flush tile, we could cover up the front of the fireplace with something temporary (I mean, we are in Texas. A fireplace isn't really necessary, but I wouldn't want to take it out completely or do anything too crazy for resale purposes.) and put a TV/entertainment center directly in front of the fireplace.

I told Matt last night that one way we could solve our space issues is to turn our garage into a second living area (it's actually done quite a bit here), and turn part of our side yard into a covered carport (never seen this, but most people here don't have yards big enough...).

He said we ought to be content with what we have.

Oh, if only it were that easy...