I rejoiced to hear some of your stories about happy childhoods ... and was sad to hear of people who were disappointed that their former homes or/and neighbourhoods had deterioated. But especially sad to hear that a few of you had endured such unhappy childhoods that you felt that you couldn't stand going back. Memo to Country Sunshine (and some others): "You don't ask - you don't get!". Take courage in hand, put on a big smile ... and sashay up to the front door. If they say, "No" ... you're no worse off. Right? We had a big 36' x 40' old white brick farmhouse near London, Ontario, when I was a child, with six bedrooms upstairs , three of them with built-in closets, and a big old walnut clothes press in one of the ones lacking one - Dad's bedroom was downstairs, would be an office/den, now, off of the large kitchen/dining room. Brick summer kitchen and woodshed on the back. Mom became ill when I was just short of 6, Grandpa (Dad's) and Grandma had moved in with her sister a few years before when Dad took over the farm. Grandpa died not long after Mom got sick so Grandma moved in with us and the farmhand's wfe helped in the house. World War II started in '39 when I was 10, so my younger brothers and I were the only hep that Dad had on our large farm. I lived there till I was 17, visited later after finished college (fiends from church had bought the farm when we moved west [that was "friends" from church: dratted keyboads!]). We had a quite close family ...Grandma used to get after us, e.g. for running up the back stair and sliding down the banister of the front stair ... telling us that she'd give us the strap ... but we laughed at her, saying that she, who had a bt of a hard time getting around, having inward cuvature of the spine, couldn't catch us! I have happy memories of the place: Mom not being there was just a fact of life. It was torn down a number of years ago, when they put a freeway from Sarnia, across from Port Huron, to join the one between Windsor(Detroit) and Toronto that goes just south of London. ole joyful

Autum it can be staggering on the cost of lots in some areas. We are really low end here from about 12K for a city lot which are 50 by 150 ish. They vary. We bought half an acre for 19K. Wish it was smaller but to get what we wanted on the lot we needed this much because it is a triangle. So we ended up with more dreaded lawn than I wanted. My friend has two houses one huge at 6 bedrooms two story.Daylight basement being one of the stories. Barns out buildings and a second smaller two bedroom house all on almost 10 acres for 160K. So on the other end of the scale there are places going pretty darn cheep. Certainly more than we want to deal with no matter how inexpensive. As far as DIY it is so much harder as you say the older you get. Some thing that I could easily do in an hour and not even batting an eye takes me so much longer now and I some times have to think if it is even worth it. And with my DH 10 years older then I am I can not always ask for his help now as I need to consider if it will cause him as much pain if not more than me. I was just thinking today to get it all done as fast as I can now or seriously consider hiring some one to help me. I just hired a guy the other day to lay some pavers in the dogs yard to lower the mud level in the house this winter. There was just one little corner needing to be finished filled in.He lifted and carried four pavers at a time when I would struggle with carrying ONE. And my knee does not work=bend like it should any more. Needs surgery I have to wait on. My ankle is still healing from a fall a year ago.I struggled to carry an end table this morning to move it from one room to another. A few years ago it was not hard to move.And I still have not finished painting the inside of our house and usually I have a house painted inside and out in the first year. This was a new house but builders paint is crappy. NOW the outside needs painting too. Next year and we all will get to decide what colors. So glad this is a small house. The cost of paint is staggering now and where I buy it in Oregon they added two dollars a gallon fee for?? some thing about the environment.GGGRRRRRRRR

It was more that I was soooo excited to have such a great kitchen in a house that was in our price range and I saw it as "wow, I might have picked all of this myself... except for the counters." I really love shaker cabinets and although natural maple wouldn't have been my first choice, it wouldn't have been my last either. From the moment I saw the house I had in my head that the kitchen could be perfect if I just replaced the counters. I LOVE corian counters, I know most don't, but we had them in our first house and I really loved the surface. Then the list of things we wanted to do in "phase 1A" of making the house our own was formed and I just couldn't justify ripping out perfectly functional 1 year old counters because I wanted corian that would have cost nearly $5k. With that same $5k we did everything else in the entire downstairs, including new crown moulding in the dining room and living room, the wallpaper and borders, paint, the floor in the kitchen (the old one was just not functional for us) plus a bunch of plumbing work (some old house issues but also installing a whole house filter, slop sink in basement, plus running water and gas for washer/dryer on the first floor) and other assorted stuff. That money went a LONG way to making the entire house "ours" and frankly, if we had used them for counters i think the impact would not have been as great.... or rather that I managed to achieve just as much impact by changing just about everything else and leaving the counters as is. Unless anyone here has a small house and a huge pot of money I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about on that front. So no, I didn't care much for the counters when I first moved into the house but once I decided to work with them, I surprised myself by how much I ended up liking them. One thing I liked about the PO's kitchen (even though I didn't like a lot of his decor choices) was that it felt fresh and clean and I think the green counters contribute heavily to that. I figured out a way to work my favorite color, cranberry/pomegranite red, into the equation as well as that vintage coziness I was seeking using some of the better parts of my husband's coca cola collection and it all just sort of clicked. I love my house and I love that I've been able to do most things on a budget with a little creativity, some ingenuity and a LOT of patience. To get back OT a little bit, I think actually this is a benefit of a smaller house... yeah you might not have as much room to store materials but the scale of the projects being smaller allows you to save time and money on less materials. Our house is on the big end of small... well, frankly I don't consider 1900 sf to be all that small but we have many rooms, 4 bedrooms, 2 baths, an eat in kitchen, formal dining room, living room, mud room and a fairly large front entry hall and we face a lot of small house challenges because with the exception of our kitchen, our rooms are on the small side... but when we were looking at homes I was overwhelmed at the thought of renovating larger homes. It felt like I'd never be able to get my arms around the whole thing. With a smaller house, there feels like there is an end in sight even with my snail's pace.

Beagles said exactly what I was thinking. To be honest, your old hand drawn sketch was too difficult for me to really understand. I knew what you were trying to do - figure out if it would work. To see if your concepts were sound. I get that. But I can also understand how the more technical-minded folks on GW would get annoyed when your responses were brushing off what they considered to be the bones of your project. I read most of your posts (here and on th other forums) and it always seemed like you were saying "eh, we'll figure out if the house is going to fall over later...but look at my pretty inspiration pictures". (if that wasn't what you were saying I apologize but that's the impression I got) Not knowing if the bones are good enough seemed to be the big stumbling block in the lines of communication. You want to know if it'll look right and everyone else is trying to ask if it's even possible. But now with the new plan sketch it's much clearer to me what you're trying to do (maybe it's the engineer in me). As far as your first floor layout, I like it but I would consider shrinking the opening to the living room on the front wall and move the hall/coat closet into that corner by the front door. So when you do have guests coming in they don't have to walk to the center of the house to get their jackets. Your clawfoot tub bathroom is nice but I think that if you moved the sink to the common wall with your master bath then you could maybe add a small linen closet where the sink is now. That way guests wouldn't have to go into your bedroom space to get extra TP or towels or anything. Just some thoughts. I have no idea what to tell you about the roof lines and outside view of the home without seeing what your mock up looks like. I'm not good at picturing things in my mind. And macybaby I have a picture of myself looking much the same except I was covered in plaster dust from our demo. We haven't gotten to the mudding stage yet, but I'm sure I'll be covered from head to toe again. We knew going into our kitchen renovation that the sunporch would have to come off and be rebuilt. There was essentially no structure. As soon as we took the trim off we could see that the corners were made from 2x4's in an L shape...we thought we might have load bearing windows. No headers back there at all. The only we saved was the roof. Luckily we didn't find any other major damage in the rest of the kitchen that we didn't anticipate. We're tearing out the floor down to the joists and even some of those are going to be repaired (sistering new joists to them to even out the floor)...but again, we knew to anticipate this before starting. Our kitchen budget was roughly $25k (not including a 5% contingency) and I think we're going to come in at $26k. I consider that a success. Of course we were hoping to come in closer to $15k but we did all of our investigation work a head of time and knew what kind of budget we needed to do it right. Of course I would've rather been thinking about paint colors and stain for the cabinets but I kind of figured, why waste my time and tease myself thinking about the pretty stuff if I didn't even know we could afford it. And the only reason our kitchen is getting done in the budget we have is because we're also doing all the work ourselves (with the help of some friends). All the demo, framing, flooring, electrical, plumbing, drywall...everything.