Let a Year Go By
By Never teh BrideWhen you’ve just bought a house, especially if it’s your first and the house itself could use a little fixing up, it’s hard not to want to start knocking down walls and building additions. Yet as strong as the urge to remodel right away can be, I’d council you to wait. At least a year. Maybe two if you’re planning on doing anything drastic like starting your own business, becoming a telecommuter, or having a baby.
“What?” you say, both incredulous and impatient to get those renovations underway.
But hear me out. Unless you have solid, unchangeable life plan that will guide your every action for the next decade or you have enough spare cash to re-remodel whenever you like, you may find that one or two years from now what you need from your home is quite different than what you needed from it when you closed. It’d be shame to build a dormer and turn two bedrooms into a single master bedroom just to discover that the bedroom you sacrificed would have made the perfect home office or crafting room or nursery. It’d be even worse to renovate without thinking very carefully and end up with a mishmash like this:
So consider letting a year (or more) go by before you nail down your remodeling plans. I guarantee you that in a year or two, your house will tell *you* whether you need to expand your kitchen or build a front porch or install a bay window. The Beard and I have been in our little house just over two years, and only now have we come to realize what we need to do with the upstairs, which is add a landing with a banister and divide one of the two bedrooms into a home office for each of us. I’m glad we waited until the house told us what we should do because if we hadn’t, we would have ended up with two bedrooms upstairs. It would have been nice, but not what we needed.
