Five things I love/hate about our current house

Featured image: Nadine Stay

For almost every decision, there are tradeoffs. Sometimes you don’t recognize the cons because there are so many pros. I never thought I’d leave Des Moines until I started dating my fiancé. The pros of living in Des Moines simply outweighed any potential cons. I’m not sure I could even name cons at the time! It’s where my job and friends were, I had a nice apartment and was close to so many amenities. When I started dating someone 2 hours away, the pro/con balance started to tip. Less traffic, more nature, and lower cost of living became valuable to me along with being closer to Brandon. Des Moines never changed, but my perception did!

I won’t have any pictures in this post. I might post pictures of this house in the future (because I will be posting pictures of the new house), but I’m not good at photography. Most of the pictures on my iPhone turn out blurry, and I’m never sure what I’m doing wrong!

The size

I think this house is the perfect size for a family of four. If we didn’t have plans to expand in the future, I think it’s possible we could try to renovate the basement to increase our office size, rearrange the bathroom space, maybe even do something different with the kitchen. On one hand we know this isn’t the house for us because it’s limited in bedrooms and isn’t really setup for a big addition, but it’s nice how cozy and quick to clean it is!

The windows

I love how you see nature everywhere you turn in our house. Except for our office, every room has windows! They’re large windows with pretty medium wood trim. The only downside is they are so drafty! If we planned on living here longer, we would need to get them replaced. Occasionally you can put your hand by the trim and feel the air come through.

The spiral staircase

I love this detail! It’s fun and unique (at least to me!) to have a spiral staircase. It’s a great space saver, but it’s not practical as the only way down to the basement from the inside. It’s hard to carry stuff down and is definitely a safety concern when little kids are around. The balusters are actually spaced further apart than recommended, so I would be nervous to have a baby crawl near it!

The carpet

Thick, plush carpet is so nice to walk on. You can hardly tell when it needs vacuumed (although it stains), whereas crumbs and dust can’t be ignored on hard surface floors. I called out losing the carpet as something I’m excited about in a previous post, but I will miss its coziness. The good news is my mom frequently gets me slippers for Christmas, so my feet are ready to make the change!

The DIY opportunities

This house is perfect for DIY opportunities! For one, there are a lot of places to make improvements, and two, we can’t really be afraid to mess up. The only downside with wanting to do little DIYs is that we don’t want to invest a lot of money into this house if we will be tearing it down. When we have the new house, I’ll probably be too scared to mess anything up! It’ll be too clean of a slate to start with.

I liked making this post because it really shows you that there are pros and cons to everything and that the grass isn’t always greener. The grass will just look a little different based on your perspective.