The Case - continued, and For the Love of My House

The laundry baskets have been found! However, the laundry has not been. The baskets had been buried by piles of bedding.

Houses without linen closets - now there is an example of a man designing versus a woman designing. We live in an at-least-85-year-old house (these are the number of years we can prove). Our old house has walk-in closets under the eaves. The floor space of the closets is huge; I've actually had bedrooms smaller than one of the closets. But, the way the closets are arranged (and lack of headroom) doesn't leave much room for clothes hanging and easy-to-get-to storage. If we want to lose something for several years, we put it in the back of one of the closets. (Tells you how often I clean, doesn't it!!!!) -configuration +size

For the love of old houses, we:
-Live without linen closets.
-Do without grounded wiring in part of the house.
-Live with old plumbing.
-Live with a broken toilet seat that we can't fix (RUST) without changing the whole toilet which really means the whole bathroom would have to be redone because the color (harvest gold) wouldn't match the sink and tub.
+Live with a large bathroom sink which if changed would mean the bathroom vanity would have to be rebuilt. The sink is big enough to bathe a baby in, and it has a sprayer!
+Live with a large, deep, wonderful bathtub/shower.
-Live with no place to store a vacuum cleaner.
-Live without a real coat closet.
-Live with no place to put a TV that doesn't have light shining off of it (or else the TV has to fight the piano for wall space).
+Live with high ceilings in some of the rooms.
-Live with a wet cellar.
-Live with steep, narrow, tilting stairs to the cellar.
-Live with a cellar with a very low head room - 5 feet max in spots.
-Live with steep, narrow stairs to the bedrooms on the second floor.
-Live with a kitchen that was put in the only space left when the house was built. It is very narrow, with limited counter space and cupboards and also is the hallway from an added on "wrecked" room to the rest of the house. It has 6 (count them!) doors in it and really no way to change that.
-Live with a kitchen that originally housed a big cook stove, but not a refrigerator. The kitchen was remodeled in the 40's and some in the 70's, and we made some changes. There still really isn't room for a frig. (Originally, there was a "summer" kitchen housed in a separate building that is now our garage. The garage is more useful because we are lucky to have 3 months of warm weather. Can you imagine the how cold the food must have been by the time the cook got it to the house?)
+Live with a kitchen that has real wood cupboards, shelves, drawer bottoms, sides, and backs. Sure, they are partially plywood, painted, and from the 40's, but they are really sturdy - no plastic!
-Live with a washer and drier in the kitchen. YUCK!
-Live with drafts and high heating bills.
-Live without heat on the second floor (except the bathroom - I insisted it have heat).
- and + Live with fans in all the windows on the second floor during the summer.
+Live with larger than tract home living room/dining room.
+Live with larger than tract home bedrooms.
+Live with a larger than most tract home bathroom.
- and + Live with only one full bathroom. (We do have a 1/2 bath on the main floor. There is a 3/4 bath in the cellar; but we have never tried to fix or use that one. I'm guessing that the sewer line doesn't have enough slope.)
+Live with a huge yard and mature landscaping.
-Live with floors that slope all directions. (Makes life interesting!)
+Live with real wood doors and floors (although they all need refinishing).
-Live with a garage that is too small for most cars.
+Live with indoor and outdoor access to the cellar.
+Live with a living room/dining room that stays cool all summer (except when it stays over 95 degrees for several days - doesn't happen much).
-Live with 2 chimneys that are no longer usable.
+Live in a house where the pipes have never frozen (knock on wood!) even when it was 20 below for 10 days in a row and below zero for 6 weeks one year.)
-Have a crumbling foundation that will probably cost more to fix than the house is worth.
++++Have a reasonable (by today's standard) monthly house payment.
+Have a fairly good floor plan that I would soooo copy if I ever built my own house with adding on a kitchen, pantry, laundry room, 1/2 bath, and ground floor master bedroom w/bath, naturally :).

So with all the negatives, do I want to live in a new home? NO.