Organise ideas for our dream home

We’ll love a white fireplace in our home. We’d actually love one in both our Formal Dining room and our Family Room but at least in the Formal Room would be great.

Since we’ll probably only use it around Christmastime I’d love to just remove the burning stuff and put a big potted flower in there during the spring or some sort of floral arrangement.

Here is a sample pic of the size of dining room we’d like to have. Maybe a little wider so there would be more room on the side for a buffet table, china cabinet/hutch or etc.
Also, we wouldn’t choose that sort of light fixture hanging down from the ceiling and our French doors and molding will be white of course and our choice of paint colour will probably not be dark green like that. But, you get the main idea… medium sized dining room seating capacity of about 6, room on the sides for hutch, etc. and sliding French doors on one side leading to Formal Room, exterior French doors to the other side leading to stone patio in back garden :-) Absolute perfection!

• I have two Christmas tree sets one is natural and quite like Christmas; red coloured decor, berries, elves, animals, etc. The other set is all white decorations and light green sort of Victorian and very fancy; white crochet snowflakes, lots of white and light green ribbons and glass bulbs, clear lights, glass ice icicles, etc
  It will be lovely to have a house big enough to use two trees and have both of my beautiful sets up. Right now I only have the white set up on my tree, as my house is smallish. But, with our dream house we could put the red set with multicoloured lights up in the Family Room and the white set up in the Formal Room.

The picture I found on google is KIND OF what we’d like only not that fancy. You can see in the picture how the French Doors lead to the dining room which I love and that’s why I chose the picture.

I realise that I started talking about my Dad in that last entry about family room. This is because it is very likely that my father will be helping Mark and I with several things on our house. My Dad is VERY talented in several areas and he can build almost anything! I’m going to attach some examples. Here’s the first one. He can lay brick very well like in this picture of his house. He also built that retainer wall for thie shrubs and he laid that stone on the side of the house…

We’d like to have a large family room in the basement. This is the one room in the house that I think would be OK to have berber carpet in. Soft furniture is a must as well as a large projection TV. My father redid his whole basement by himself and it came out beautifully so Mark has said he looks forward to my Dad working with us on this project. Here is my Dad’s projection screen he made (you just have to buy a solution to pain it with).

Mark and I both feel that bedrooms do not need to be anything all that special. Afterall, bedrooms are a place to sleep and we don’t exactly want our children to have endless things in their rooms to cause them to never want to come out. We don’t think it is necessary for children to have computers in their rooms either as we all know the trouble kids can get into with that. So basically the bedrooms will consist of bed, closet, dresser, night stand, fire alarm, toys. If our children want small tv’s for their bedrooms that would be OK but we really dont’ feel it’s necessary the amount of things some paretns give their children in their rooms… it makes sending the child to their room a treat rather than punishment!

For our master bedroom though I would like to have our own bathroom with shower, dual sinks, and possibly even a whirlpool tub (down the road if we have the money) for relaxing with Mark :-P

I guess we could also have the kids share bedrooms but it would be nicer if they could each have their own.

OK, picture this… As you walk in you have an enterance room which to the left of would be a formal room with french doors leading to a medium sized dining room which is open via arch to the kitchen.

To the center as you stand in the enterance way would be a staircase to upstairs and arch leading to the large kitchen.

To the right as you stand in the entereance way would be the family room with seating and entertainment system, bathroom, and a small mud room with access to garage.

Walking up the stairs you would find 4-5 bedrooms, a bathroom, and a hopefully a study/computer room. One of the bedrooms would be the masterbedroom, which would hopefully have it’s own bathroom.

We’d love for the layout of our house to have:

all hardwood floors
a large well equipped kitchen (modern and white)
a medium sized dining room & formal room via French doors
a medium sized family room with fireplace, TV, etc.
a bathroom downstairs with a shower and toilet
4-5 medium sized bedrooms
a bathroom upstairs
a bathroom in the master bedroom
a basement refinished with laundry room and projector tv room
a back garden spacious enough for pool, grill, fire pit, garden, and tiny homemade greenhouse or garden shed
a two car garage with a loft upstairs that could eventually be converted into guest house or rental property.

Absolutely PERFECT! The only thing I’m confused about is whether we should have the masterbedroom downstairs or not because when we get older we minght not be able to make it upstairs. I was thinking of just having a half bathroom downstairs but then I thought that’s not good for when we are older and might want to bath downstairs due to difficulty getting upstairs. Perhaps when that time comes we’d be better off to sell our dream house and buy something single story. Who knows… I am trying to think of the long-term with this as it will likely take us years and years to even get this house the way we’d love it.

We will need four-five bedrooms as we hope to have 3 children. Five bedrooms would be nice as it would mean an extra room for guests. Hardwood floors of course. Our master bedroom will need it’s own bathroom with dual sinks so we don’t have to share the same sink for brushing teeth/washing face. This is necessary for us as we always want to do these things at the same time. Maybe it could even have a jacuzzi tub (eventually after saving up our money)!

What Mark and I will choose for our “dream house” will depend on where we live. We have always loved white brick houses but would be happy with siding as well. We like colonial style as we are thinking of living in NY or New England unless we go back to the U.K.

We would love the house to be spacious so that there would be room for a family of five, pets, and any family members that may need to live with us in the future.

We want something classic that has charm to be decorated well for the holidays. Hard wood floors are a must, that’s all we have in our house now. We’d like to buy a house with a nice basement that we could eventually refinish into a big family room with lots of comfy furniture, in wall shelves for holding DVD’s, tapes, etc along one wall, and a huge projector TV :-P

We would love to have a garage with loft above. The space could be used as a guesthouse and even be rented out as an apartment, which would give some extra money towards the mortgage.

Lastly we’d like a back garden spacious enough for a pool and possibly a hot tub, seating, grill area, fire pit, veggie/herb garden, and maybe even a small green house and gardening shed.
I know pretty much we want EVERYTHING except the mansion, beach houses, etc that people have been describing although we wouldn’t mind living on the water someplace beautiful like Cape Cod, Maine, or on a nice lake! However, we’re also perfectly happy to live in a small city.

Here is a picture of something close to what we’d like.

Cheers,
Sissy & Mark

We have a 3 bedroom yellow house in a small city. It’s not bad, all hardwood floors except linoleum for kitchen and bath. I gave a fresh coat of paint to EVERYTHING when I first moved in and also refinished the hardwood floors. So, the house is looking pretty good. This summer I’ll need to replace a few old windows, repaint the white picket fence (fenced in back yard) and around the foundation of the house. It has a full basement and attic but they are not refinished. Basement is dry though and clean and I store extra food supplies, laundry room, treadmill and extra tv down there. Not to mention countless other junk like extra dishware, tools and boxes of holiday decor.

The mortgage payments are not bad ($715 including escrow account) and bought at a good time a couple years ago when intrest rates were at all time lows. Also, I currently rent out a room for $350 per month so am in an OK position to be saving up for a dream house.

Mark will be moving over from England in August so after that we’ll have two steady incomes in the house. Of course my housemate will be leaving around the same time. I guess Mark and I could continue to rent out a room but we’d kind of like the privacy at that point especially after being forced to live apart for so long. By then immigration will be pretty much sorted and we can both work and save our money.

So, that is when we’ll start saving for our “dream house”. We are already so excited about this and have thought a lot about what we’d like and where we’d like to be!

I think we’ll have no problem selling our yellow house when we’re ready as it’s in a good, safe neighborhood that is close to a school and many other things nice for kids.