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Working Moms
2chatter
member
House Hunting Advice
2chatter
member
in Working Moms
We are house hunting. We cannot seem to locate a home with everything on our list. We can find houses with most things....but the one thing most often lacking is an office space for me. I work full time, but they closed my local office, so I work from home. It has been three years that I have waited and saved so we can move and I can finally have an office.
Honest opinions - am I being selfish if we turn down otherwise great homes? WWYD? Would this be something on which you would compromise?
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Re: House Hunting Advice
DH just keeps sending me houses that totally would not work from a work perspective, and it was making me feel like maybe I am insane. We have three kids, and 5 BR houses with everything else we want seems to be rare. We have an offer in on a house with an office with a door that closes off of the master, but there are foundation questions, so we are looking at backups and coming up with absolutely nothing.
The idea is that kids will be here in the afternoon, with a part time nanny, so more than ever (my mom got the kids before my Dad got so sick) I need a space. I really don't want to work at the kitchen table then have to move to a room with a door when the kids are due home. I really want a space where I can put all my "stuff". And having my own space would make it way easier to knock out an hour of work when the kids are around - right now, it's about impossible.
House hunting is not fun when you have a long list of things you "need" for sanity - like a bedroom for each child, an office and a seperate living space for the kids (so open floor plans like a loft open over the family room) don't work for us. UGH I feel for all of you also house hunting!
I WAH a couple of days a week and agree you need your own space. However, given that it sounds like you have been looking for a long time, can you think of some alternatives - like a house with an unfinished basement that you can finish off to include an office. Or maybe if there is a LR and FR in the house, close off the LR and make that the office unless you really will use both.
Just trying to think out of the box as it sounds like while you are waiting for the ideal house, your current work environment is realy not suitable.
If there really are not other options that will work for you, then I say holding out for the office is the best thing to do.
GL!
If you were holding out for an ideal crafting room or a spare room for your knicknack display, I'd say you were being selfish.
If you're going to be working from home for a long haul, I don't think its unreasonable for you to want the "right" space.
I would caution that while a bedroom for each child is nice, perhaps that is not a need. You could use that bedroom as an office and have two kids share. We are planning on building a desk into our laundry room. It has great sunlight and is away from everything else. It will be in the utility room, but it will be dedicated space and it won't require using a bedroom.
I was going to say this. I also WFH and a separate office is way more of a priority than each kid having their own room (we have a DD due next month and the kids will have to share becasue I use our 3rd bedroom as my office). You mentioned that a separate living for the kids is also on your list. If kids toys are in the separate living space then won't they use the bedroom for mostly just sleeping making sharing a realistic option?
We will be settling on a house in June and we ran into the same thing. Almost everything was perfect in many of the houses, but the ones that were ideal were WAAAAAAAY above our price range (like by $50-100K), in not so great areas (or not so great schools).
We wanted a 4 bedroom plus office/2.5 bath and ended up with a 3 bedroom, 2 bath. Here's our plan: the house has a 3 car garage and a nice driveway. We will section off part of the garage and convert it into an office space for DH. Garage is already insulated and has a heating unit.
The baby (if he ever decides to show up) will go in the small bedroom and the larger bedroom will be made into a guest room. When the next baby comes along in 2-3 years, the baby will move to the larger bedroom and the new baby will go in the nursery. We will put windows in the Florida room and that can be a guest room if needed (will normally be a family room/play room once the windows are in). If/when baby #3 comes along, the older 2 will share the bigger room for about a year while baby is in the nursery. Then, the two of the same sex will share the bigger room. If all three are boys, then either the two bigger ones or the two younger ones will share the bigger room and the third will be in the small room.
Eventually, we hope to finish the basement to make a play area and add another half bath down there.
So I think the key is figuring out if you can eventually make the space work as you need it to even if it is not ideal. Yes, we would ideally prefer to have each kid have his own room and have a guest room, but we'll manage. We wanted the open floor plan, the ability to host things, the nice master suite, the excellent neighborhood, the quiet cul-de-sac, the top schools, the lack of HOA, the well-maintained home, etc.
I wish we had basements here, it would make life much simpler! We are so open to unusual configurations for my work space - pretty much, I need a room with a door that is not my bedroom. The laundry idea would work if we can find a room big enough...as would the three car garage conversion idea (though I wonder about cost there, as houses with three car garages are top of our price range). If we can find a house with a non-open front formal living room, that will work, because we can add doors if needed, but so far, all the houses that fit everything else are too open to enclose without serious construction.
If we had only three bio kids, sharing would be no big deal, but post-divorce, the landscape sort of sucks so the kids sharing a room is not really an option. They will already be sharing every other weekend and my office if I get one will also be shared every other weekend.
I keep hoping that the piers they added to the foundation are what the engineers recommended; but I think they only piered part of the house - which means we would have to be up to pier the rest (at 1K per pier). I am hoping against hope that the house under contract gets a clean bill of health, seriously it's our dream house and I think that is part of it....nothing compares to half acre, in a subdivision, on a creek, walking distance to the awesome elementary and middle schools with the perfect (weird things like soundproof gameroom) floorplan for our family.
these are mine too but a must have is also parking