With the delivery of my second daughter less than 24hrs away you would think I'd have something to write about that, and although I have, I will not be. Not today. Too much thinking involved. Been very slack since Jan on the blog front.
Anyway, the renovations are off. Try as I might I cannot but hand most of the blame to the architect who, knowing our budget from the outset, overshot it by quite some way. She, of course, has been paid.
I am not too surprised. I'd spoken to a couple of builders shortly after we moved in and each said, straight up, that a knock-down-rebuild or renovation-addition would cost around half a million. Where our wildly optimistic 350-400k came from I cannot recall, but it was probably dreamt up between me and DJ when we were tossing around ideas about design, construction and building materials. But, sigh, we then got an architect involved, I stepped away from the process, and our planned addition became the standard brick-on-slab construction beloved by the majority of Sydney builders.
Sal is scared to death of the bigger number and, although less shocked by it, I am not over-pleased at adding to the already decent-sized mortgage. We could have gone back to the drawing board, stripped back the design and got close to budget, but honestly, after a couple of years of to-and-fro with the council we're over it. So we'll tart the place up and shift it. Just go and buy one that's already built.
We've had a bit of a look around and if we move twice as far from my office as we are now we can upgrade from 2 small beds on a 467sq block to 4 big beds, rumpus room, pool, double garage, big living area on over 800sq. In fact, dollar for dollar i is damn near a straight swap. And keep in mind that the doubled distance becomes only 15km from the city. My travel time to my usual beach cafe in Dee Why would go up by a whole minute. It really is a no-brainer.
Unfortunately - for me - the abso-fucking-lutely perfect place is on the market at the moment. I can see myself living in it; properly see myself, proper day-dream this-is-MY-shangri-la. But it is on the market now, which is piss-poor timing. But worse, Sal doesn't like it because it isn't very pretty. No matter the awesome practicality, if it don't look right it don't get a look in. Oh well, I'm (not at all) sure there will be others...I was speaking to Pete in the dog-park on Monday morning and told him about the place. I said "it's bloody fantastic" to which he said "man cave?" "Yep", I replied "and a double garage with internal access." "We're simple creatures" he said. He's right y'know.
Exciting times to come. Did I mention the impending birth of my second daughter? I'm sure I will soon enough.
2 comments:
Good luck with your renovations and congratulations on the impending birth of your second daughter!
If the house is off the market by the time you actually want to move, it's because there's an even better house with your name written on it. Hope your impending daughter doesn't keep you waiting.
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