When we bought our house, I wasn't married yet and was able to get a single woman/low income/first time home buyers grant. I got $25k toward a house, but it had to be less than $100k and in the village...no problem. We found and love our house (we had already negotiated on another house to within $1k, but didn't feel comfortable committing to it, when my mom's friend called us and said "Hey, there's a house for sale on S Ave. Go look at it." We did and we bought that house instead. Which was good because, that huge flood 5 years ago, the other house had their car in the living room).
We had a 15 year mortgage on our house and only have 9 years left right now. The grant comes up in September, at which point they reassess your income/dependents and determine how much, if any, you owe back on the grant. I don't think we'll be owing anything back.
Even before finding out about Mo, Larry, and Curly (or possibly Ron, Harry and Hermione) we had planned on doing this renovation sometime in the next 5 years, since the roof is getting worse, the foundation is terrible, etc. We think we might be pushing up our renovations.
While we can sleep 6 people comfortably in this house, there is no way we can feed 6 people comfortably. Our dining room is separated from our kitchen by the living room...lots of trips back and forth and our breakfast nook barely seats Matt, Ave and I.
What we plan on doing is making the entire kitchen/breakfast nook/laundry room/office area bigger and all one space...allowing for a bigger table, access to the backyard (I cannot see our backyard, right now, from our kitchen), and a much more open feel.
We would also be putting a full finished basement below that space (this only came to me about a month ago) that would be a playroom/family room. It would be so much cooler during the summer, easier to heat in the winter and give the kids a place to play and keep out their toys (we seriously limit the number of toys Ave has, because our living room is really not big enough for them...which is not necessarily a bad thing).
Then we would be putting our bedroom on the second floor (above the kitchen), with a private bathroom (since we only have 1.5 bathrooms in our house) and closet and a small niche for my sewing....that would open up another bedroom and give us 2 good size bedrooms upstairs and 1 smaller one. It would also open our dining room to being our classroom.
We're hoping that once FIL is done with building his new house, he'll be willing to work on our's (won't be happening before Spring 2013). Matt just doesn't have the time to oversea the work, nor do we have the money to pay a contractor to do the work. It would be FIL, the guy who helped build his house, and whatever time Matt and anyone else could give.
We'll probably end up either moving in with the ILs or into their old house (the one they wanted to sell us) while the work is done, as it will NOT be safe for kids to be here.
Matt suggested maybe buying their house or looking at another house, after I did the math and figured out the cost of our addition, what a new house is running (what we want), and the additions and renos that would be necessary on the ILs house, it's cheaper for us to stay in our house and do the work....by at least $75-100k.
Here's a really quick sketch (and not at all how I actually draw up blue prints...remember, I did want to go to school to be an architect) of what we're looking at as far as design etc. Click on it to make it bigger.
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