Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Worth the Effort or Not?

When you own (or are buying) your own home, there's always something that needs repaired, remodeled, ripped out and/or resolved, isn't there? And it really makes no never mind if you have a nice relatively new house or an antique, like mine is as there's always something needed.

ALWAYS!

This place of mine will be 109 years old this year and overall, for a house that age, it's not in really terrible shape but it does need a good bit of work nevertheless.

One thing we're going to have to try to figure out how to get done -sometime in the not too distant future -is a new roof. Yes, by the standards most people set for having a home reroofed, it's well overdue to have this done but lucky for us, it's never leaked yet and that's a bonus considering the current roof is probably at least 33-34 years old now!

Then there's the siding that needs finished up because the contractor who did the bulk of the repairs on the house after the fire managed to screw up my funding so there wasn't enough of my loan and insurance money left to finish siding the back of the house. Sure would be nice to find a way to get that done too.

We need a new window in Kurt's room as the one in there is in an early stage of rotting out because it was not installed properly -or so they tell me anyway -but other than that the inside isn't in all that dire a need at the moment with the exception of the basement, that is.

And that's something I'm really wondering about -if it would be worth the money, time, mess and such to have the old concrete floors prettied up and covered up with basement floor tile? I might think about this differently if the stairway to the basement was a bit wider with a handrail and also, if each room down there were also a tiny bit larger as well as being heated too but since it's highly doubtful that those things will or could happen here plus, we'd also have to find a way to make the area "deeper" too because there isn't all that much headroom down there, so I'm thinking there really isn't much point then to try to figure out a way to improve on that area of the house and make it into something a bit more useful than just to house the washer and dryer.

I guess this is one area where the old expression "Can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" really is the truth, isn't it?

1 comment:

terri said...

The list of things that need doing around a house is never-ending, isn't it? And it seems like no matter how much you do to keep things up and improve, there's always something falling apart and needing attention.