Kitchen Plans

I stopped at the cabinet shop near my office on my way home today.  I spent some time with one of the kitchen designers and this is what we came up with for the new kitchen.  The window behind the range looks into the dining area and has no glass.  It may need to be lowered in the wall to fit the range hood though.

This is the same location the sink is in now, so the plumbing will not have to change.  Although we will rip it all out and replace it with PEX pipe anyway.  I don't know if we will put a cabinet over the sink or not.  Either way, I will make sure there is a light over the sink.  I hate the way our house is where you are working in your own shadow.

Kelly is concerned with how far the dishwasher is from the sink.  But really, it's a very small kitchen (9'-7" x 9'-3") and you can't get very far from anything.  I think it will work out really well.  It actually has about as much cabinet space as our house!

Inside Pictures

The kitchen is the first thing you see when you walk in the door from the street side of the house.  We have not decided how the new kitchen will be laid out, but the outside walls will not be moved.  The lower cabinet and the wood fired stove will both come out and be sold to help fund the renovation.

 After you walk through the kitchen and turn left, this is the view as it is today.  Where the couch is sitting will be the bathroom in the not too distant future.

This is the area next to the bathroom.  It will be the master bedroom.  Outside the 3 large windows is the lake, no more than 10 feet away.

The dining area will not change, but the window that looks into the kitchen may get bigger.  It depends on what happens with the kitchen layout.  The section of the blue wall with the book case is the part that will come out.  It is a load bearing wall, so a header beam will have to go in to support the trusses.

We Signed Today!

Since the house does not have a bathroom right now, there is no way to get conventional financing on it.  What we had to do is get a loan for the land only and we had to find a lender that was willing to ignore the fact that there is a house sitting on the property.  Luckily the land alone appraised for $175k and we only paid $160k for the whole package.

We signed the paperwork today!  After signing I went up to the house with our real estate agent and did the walk-through and everything looked great.  We don't officially own it yet since the current owners are set to sign on Monday.  But we do have the keys!  Next is to schedule the perk test and get the septic system installed and the bathroom built.

Plans

The existing layout of the cabin has a huge amount of wasted space.  Considering the entire thing is only 775 square feet, you can't afford to waste this much space.  However, it is huge compared to the original footprint of the cabin.  The area containing the dining table and couch used to be a deck and the larger bedroom and living room was added on sometime later.

We plan to take down part of the load bearing wall that runs down the middle of the house to open it up.  The master bedroom will face the lake and we will add a bathroom as well as a utility/mechanical room with a water heater and furnace.  That way we can use the place in the winter if we want.  We may even spend a Christmas or 2 up there!

Introduction

Kelly and I have been looking for a lake house for the past year.  Sometime in the late spring we came across this one.  At the time it was priced at $225k which was pretty steep considering there is no bathroom.  It is on a really nice lake but it was just too much considering its condition.  However, it had been on the market for over a year and they had already dropped the price by $75k, so we just watched it for a while.

Mid summer the price dropped to $199k and late summer it dropped to $175k.  The offer story is really long, so I will post the full version later, but we have come to an agreement with the current owners to buy it for $160k!  The inspection has been completed and it is in surprisingly good condition for its age.  We are set to close by 1/31/2017.  There is a ton of work to be done, but it should be fun and we are really looking forward to spending time at the lake!