Why find a new house when you can knock the old one down?
We never intended to renovate our house. Certainly nothing beyond the scope of what’s considered standard home renovations. Ours was a “starter” home. A place we’d grow out of as soon as we started having a family. A place, as my mother-in-law put it when we first moved in, that was “campy.” (Which was a diplomatic way of saying that it had cardboard walls, no insulation, no heat and a nice country setting.) Plus, it was located in the City of Beacon, which, if you know anything about this area in the early nineties, was one of the least desirable cities in Dutchess County. That is not necessarily a fact, but it is the way that real estate agentsâ€â€driven by the desire to make the biggest buck possibleâ€â€represented the city. (For a better idea of what Beacon looked like in 1993/4, check out the movie Nobody’s Fool. It was filmed in the City of Beacon just before the city’s east end was rehabbed. And let’s just say that they dolled it up to make the buildings look better for the movie.) In the early nineties the City of Beacon was the one place we could afford to buy our first home, but not the place we planned on spending the rest of our lives.
Over a period of years we did do some minor remodeling–added insulation and sheet-rock. Updated the electric. Put in a heating system that actually heated the house. All upgrades necessary for the arrival of our first daughter in 1993. (Which, of course, we could have avoided if we preferred her as a popsicle.) But once these necessary improvements were completed–save a couple of paint jobs and a few yards of new carpet–we did nothing else to change the house. We just figured that once the house got too small, we’d find something bigger.
Seems simple enough eh? The kind of stuff that families have been doing for ages. But for us, finding a house we loved was a nearly impossible proposition.