I love our town-home, I really do but it is just too small for us and we want to grow our family. Believe it or not but I have spent the most amount of time living in this town-home than other home in my entire life. Growing up, we moved almost every summer. When my youngest sister was doing college applications we had to list all her residences and I think we counted 15 houses just for her residences for 18 years. I had a few more from apartments after moving out on my own then finally we bought the Riverbirch town-home. We have spent the last 5 years in this home and have loved every minute of it. I would love to stay if it were bigger. The location is perfect. We are in the middle of both of our jobs, our Dr’s, Dentists, and Pediatricians are very close. Adam’s mom lives right down the street and Aiden’s preschool is a little after that. Our whole life is summed up around this Town-home.
We want to have more children and a pet(s). The town-home is just too small. Its 1200 square feet with two bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms. It worked perfectly for the first few years but as Aiden is growing, his toys are growing in size too. We are cramped. We have stuff shoved into every little nook and cranny including the attic and small storage closet in the back. We have rented a storage unit because we have lots of stuff we want to keep but have no room for. I have been searching nearly everyday for the last 2 years trying to find the perfect home in North Raleigh with all the things I must have.
My absolute must haves are:
- Laundry room on second floor– how has this feature not been in every home. Do people love lugging their laundry up and down the stairs all the time!?!? I get that people are afraid it will leak but guess what, they have things you can purchase to help with that! I hate laundry and the fact that I have to take it all downstairs, do it, then drag it all back up to put away makes me loathe that chore so much that I actually will wait until we have no clothes to wear before starting a load!!
- 2 car garage or huge attic for storage– We have an attic, however it is about 3×4 square feet at the top of the stairs. You can’t put much there and we have one of those drop down ladders so you can’t fit too much up into that small space. A garage would be ideal for bikes, toys, storage, and our cars of course (lets get that tiny discount for having a garage on our auto policy please!). Also, I’ve always wanted to get old furniture and spruce it up- having a garage will give me that space to do so!
- Enough rooms– a bedroom for us, Aiden, Guest/nursery (when the time comes), an office (Adam works from home a lot) and possibly a place for a photography studio.
That’s it, simple, easy peasy. Of course I would gravitate toward homes with granite counter tops and stainless steel appliances and open floor plans but I had to have those top three things. Do you know how hard it is to find those 3 things in your budget in North Raleigh???? Trust me, I have been looking for 2 years. North Raleigh is great but its OLD- all the homes were built before the 80’s. You might find a new community here and there but they were way out of our budget. I love outdated homes, they remind me of all the homes we lived in and the potential they have however, they didn’t seem to care about space back then and the laundry room on the second floor was unheard of! So we had to search outside of our perfect little zone. We found a great new community that offered all the bells and whistles just 8 miles from our current home. I fell in love the with the floor plan first. I am one of those people who loves seeing the floor plan rather than the actual apartment or home to gauge how it will work for us. The floor plan had 3 bedrooms, a loft, and an office. It also has a formal dining room and breakfast nook! I looked for that floor plan or similar at other communities and couldn’t find anything remotely close to it within the same price range and not too far away from the city limits.
After I had dreamed about this floor plan for about a year, I finally convinced Adam it was time to look at homes seriously. We went to the community and fell in love. We of course went through all the what ifs and what nots and talked about it for a while before visiting again. We finally felt like the time was right. We went again to refresh our memory and even visited their sister community who had the same floor plan. We liked the first community better- had an amazing pool (we’re pool people- I’ll have to show you videos of how our son has been jumping in the deep end floaty free since being 3 years old) and not one but TWO playgrounds.
We signed up to build a home the next weekend. I never ever thought about building a home. I always thought it would be way too expensive and stressful picking out every little thing. There process is simple, easy peasy- just the way I like things!
I plan to blog my way through the whole process and can’t wait to decorate my dream home! Without further adieu, here is the infamous floor plan in all its glory! PS we opted to keep the loft open, change the second living room into a study (first floor) and have the deluxe master bathroom, its not shown here but it will have a separate tub and shower and dual sinks (all the red zones).
Arcadian Elegance 