I am a huge fan of a fixer upper. I feel you get the most bang for your buck with one. If you are not a visual person and if you are the type to reject a house because it's dirty or the paint color is wrong, or you don't like the carpeting, then find someone with vision who can help you to "see" the possibilities. I have done that with three different places. Our first place back in 1987 had wall to wall mustard colored carpet, mustard walls, ceiling and trim. Underneath the floors were gorgeous hardwood floors. We painted, wallpapered, redid the kitchen, replaced the nob and tube in that house, had a gorgeous bungalow and sold it for a small profit during the recession in 1993. Our second house had half the house turned into a doctors office. We removed the doctor's suite of offices including his "lab", and created a wonderful family home, updated the appliances, updated the wiring, painted, papered, tiled, etc and sold for a profit during this last recession back in 2010. In fact ours was the only house to sell during a 6 month period in our neighborhood. 6 years ago, my new DH and I bought a condo in a good building in FL. The building was built in 1982 and everything in the condo was original! We (meaning I designed the changes and the GC did the work with his crew. I'm getting too old to do the work myself now, but did when I was young,) gutted the condo, redid everything including moving non load bearing walls and just sold it this past spring for a hefty profit. Here's a link to the condo listing. Here are a few pics of what the condo looked like originally. This was the original kitchen. I didn't move the appliances but updated them all and donated these and the kitchen to Habitat for Humanity.This was the original view looking from the kitchen to the dining room. I opened the wall up and made a walkway into the dining room instead of having to walk around the foyer. This is the view toward the front hallway and into the kitchen from the living room. This was the view from the living room to the dining room.This was the original guest bathroom. The red one in my redone pictures.And this was the master bedroom looking towards the closet and the bathroom. In my redone condo photos, it's where the chinese chair is. The closet blocked the balcony door.And this was the master bath originally. Yes you could sit down while brushing your teeth. And finally one more of the master bath. We switched the shower with the bathtub to open up the room. Funny thing is I walked into the condo and knew it was right and with some work could be perfect because the bones were there. The layout was good, the view fantastic and it met our needs at the time. My point being that with a little sweat equity if you're handy and some vision you can turn what Vanilla Ice calls a Dud into a Stud. And if things like the kitchen are workable such as the one in my picture above, you don't have to do it all right away. You can live with the kitchen as is, and update as you have the funds. We did that in both our houses.

These are all excellent questions. I agree that this will be a complicated process but since the town is so small there are fewer competing interests to contend with. Knowing how our town has operated in the past I suspect that the decision making process will be fairly streamlined compared with a much larger city. I do agree that finding someone who can help us make sense of the latest codes is crucial. One of the many problems with the current city hall is that it isn't ADA compliant and making it so would be extremely difficult. As for land, we have a large amount of empty land behind the current city hall. The hope is that we can build on that land and relocate the DPS vehicles currently parked there but we won't know if that's feasible until we hire an architect and engineer. If we do have to relocate we will unfortunately have to operate outside of the city. Figuring out whether the land we have will work for the new city hall will have to be one of the first steps. If it's won't we'll have to develop a plan B and figure out what that is. As for annexation, I used to be quite concerned about that but I'm much less concerned about that with our new mayor and aldermen. They are making much smarter and forward thinking decisions than the previous group were making. Before we allowed ourselves to be taken over by the big city I could see us pursuing the merger of our city with a similar city right next door to us. We have wealthier residents than they do but they have a much stronger commercial tax base. They're also more suburban than we are. Despite those differences it would still be a better choice than merging with the larger city. I can start with the local AIA office but I'm not totally sure what to ask. When I started interviewing builders and architects for the house we hope to build (we can't seem to sell our current house) I felt well prepared for the interviews. I had a general design brief to present and a well research 2 page list of questions to ask. The list was so thorough that some I interviewed asked for copies of it. This time I feel completely at sea. Does anyone have advice regarding what I should ask? I have a few ideas but I feel like I've just scratched the surface. Are there any specific credentials I should look for?

Love, love, love your kitchen. What a beautiful space and functional, too! Being able to cook 8 pizzas with people in the kitchen with you and not having to ask anyone to move is remarkable and truly a testament to how well you designed the kitchen's workflow. I wish I'd have seen your idea of having the HVAC guy cut two panels of galvanized for inside your cupboard doors before I ordered a magnetic board for my command center. I have a feeling that people will be referring to your idea for a long time for their own uses. :)

Our architect will be doing us a favor by making plans at a reduced cost because he has a relationship with my husband's fire department. So I don't expect him to spend hours and hours with me while I figure out what we need. Trying to do that before hand. I do get that a dysfunctional kitchen that's pretty isn't worth much. But I know an off centered sink will forever bug me, otherwise I'm very open to functional choices that may not be the ideal design choice. I don't feel like bumping the sink maybe 3 feet is worth that sacrifice for me. My current sink isn't centered in the kitchen window and it still drives me nuts (5 years in!). Although the offset sink with centered faucet is a good thought. I still think I'd rather center it over the few inches that gains me. My other problem precluding me from being able to adapt one of these plans so far 100 percent are microwave related. I don't want a drawer because I have little children who looooove buttons (and we plan to have more) and I feel like it should be close to the fridge because of how often I go between the two. I don't love the clean up sink in the island because of potentially displaying dirty dishes but I'm willing to do it if it functions better. The sink in front of the window is another great idea but I struggle with how much dish storage that limits me to near by. I can see value to the sink being on the non window wall but I would want deeper cabinets for face space (genius idea I wouldn't have thought of!), but I'm concerned about the cost of that forcing me to go totally custom. Two sinks is a new concept for me, not sure I'd love it... I have a small sinkless island now that I love so I'm not too worried about that. But my kitchen is smaller currently so everything is close and maybe that makes it function well still.