There is just over one month left before I get the keys to the house, and last night I dreamt of the house – and the cost and work it needs. So I’m going through my budget for it, making cost-estimates from scratch again and setting priorities for works needed and works desired.
A new roof is a must-have, as is a new electrical panel. The electrical panel is easy to cost – since I’ve had three of them replaced in three different properties previously and the price seems fairly steady – but the roof is the great unknown. I have set aside a sum almost equivalent to the purchase price, just to replace the roof. Hopefully it will be significantly less, but the other potentially expensive projects such as the kitchen and bathroom will have to wait until the roof has been paid.
The bedroom (soveværelse), scullery (bryggers), bathroom (bad), kitchen (køkken) and small sitting room (værelse) are all in okay shape and can just be given a thorough clean to start with and I can live in these rooms. The larger front room (stue), though, has a mangy carpet and somewhat dodgy wallpaper that is pealing off in places, so that’s where I will start.
Fortunately a sitting room is an easy room to renovate. I need to rip out the carpet, replace it with something nice-but-cheap, tear down the wall paper, re-plaster the walls or perhaps expose the structural walls if I dare… I ought perhaps to pull down the fake wood ceiling, but I’ve never done ceilings before so it will just get a lick of white paint and I’ll pretend that is a design choice and not a cop-out!
The projects I can’t budget for before I know the price of the new roof are:
The bathroom… It needs some attention, though not urgently. But it could be a very expensive room to renovate and to be honest I don’t really care about bathrooms…
The kitchen, on the other hand… Knocking through to the small sitting room would create a large kitchen with room for a farmhouse-style dining table as well as a good kitchen. And direct access to the small garden room (udestue) and a frigging wood burner! In the kitchen! How lovely does that sound on a scale from perfect to brilliant? It CAN be done on the cheap if I keep it completely old-school and only get built-in units for the fridge, cooker and sink, using the dining table as a work surface. After all, I will rarely have to entertain a full complement of guests – unless it’s outside. But kitchens are also expensive, as is knocking down walls, so that will have to wait until a new roof has been paid for.
The garage… Eventually it will become either a master bedroom or a studio with a sofa bed for guests. I hope I can afford to replace the old wooden garage door with glass doors, turning it from a dark and dingy room into a bright and beautiful space. I could use a large dining table in the kitchen for many of my craftsy hobbies, but some are just a bit more messy and would be better suited in a separate room.
The large shed in the garden (cinder block walls and corrugated steel roof on wooden rafters) could have potential for providing space for a studio, though. It would be deadly cold in winter, but during summer one part of it could be a nice studio. (It has two rooms, and the old chicken coop could become the wood store and the other – larger – room could become a studio/workshop/whatever.)
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I really can’t wait to have my very own house! And of course I have ridiculous plans for the garden as well, but the garden will survive a bit of neglect over the winter, whereas the house wants attention ASAP…