I'm totally someone who should live in an awesome house. I feel it, you know? I feel very at home in awesome houses.
My friend has an awesome house, and when I lounge on the couch on her covered back porch overlooking her pool and I grab a drink from the stocked fridge beside me, I think: "Ya, I get this. This is totally me."
So it sometimes surprises me that I don't live in an awesome house. I mean, my house is awesome; for starters it has a roof and keeps me warm and dry and safe, so... awesome, right? But it also has a back deck that has nails sticking up and not-insignificant gouges from an ill-advised DIY pressure-washing attempt.
MLS offers me houses with sprawling splinter-less decks, and I'm torn. Should I Renovate? Remortgage? Replace? Relocate? Repeat.
Daily, I'm faced with loving or listing... like a never-ending episode of the similarly named show, but without chipper hosts Hilary and David guiding me along. Instead, my kids chip the paint and make me want to move, but alone.
The last time I was in the market, in 2006, the trend seemed to be renos. Bins popped up on front lawns and second floor additions were born. Before all of our bank accounts went to sh*t in 2008, the money was flowing like the new Moen rain shower heads.
Ten years later, bulldozers are on the lawns and the homes go down and up faster than I can come up with a witty metaphor for. It's like no one can decide to love it, OR list it, and so they just knock the whole thing down and start from scratch. 'Honey, let's move, but like, just stay here...'.
However, most of the people I know who've rebuilt tell me it was the best financial option they could make, short of not spending three quarters of a million dollars.
For me, that's just not an option right now. I don't have the resources to rebuild, the resolve to renovate, or a good enough reason to re-move.
And so I remain.
