I've been weighing a ton of options with the house, I haven't put a dime into it yet, that can't be extracted out. As I've lived here, I've slowly figured out, that every part of this house is an addition, and that every part is built differently than the last.
The current problems:
Electrically, this place is a disaster, I've been trying to look away, but it's like a train wreck.
Huge footprint, small house. because of the overall layout of the house, I have a ~2000 sq ft house, that feels like 1000 sq ft.
the house is pretty close to the road, and the road is busy enough to bother me when I'm on night shift.
Originally, when I bought the place, I figured I could rearrange the floor plan a bit, to make the house feel bigger, or at least, more it's size.
this approximate the floor plan the yellow outline represents what I think was originally built:
the more I try and rearrange it to work, the more I realize it's not going to be easy, or financially responsible to do so, I would be in it 60% of the way to building a better house, and still have a odd shaped, uncomfortable house.
so, where do I go from here?
here's a terribly drawn aerial view of the property:
The road is black, the house purple with the "X" on it, and pool, blue, and the shop, yellow.
My plan, build a pole barn out back a ways (orange block) and start buying materials, keep large stuff under the pole barn, and keep stuff that needs to stay dry inside the house in one of the bedroom not in use, or one of the other rooms. I can stay in this dump of a house while I do it, and even do some pre-fab of the walls, then once I have everything together, build the foundation, and throw together a house relatively quickly.
it's not an ideal plan, but I want to maintain not having to make payments on anything but my mortgage, and I don't want to refi (unless I somehow am able to get an even lower rate).
The hardest part so far, is finding a set of plans that even remotely meet what I want. so far, I've only found a couple of plans that even come close to what I would want to build. most modern designs have lots of detail in the roof lines, with a bunch of gables and different pitches. I HATE THIS. it's ugly, expensive, hard to build, hard to maintain, more places to leak etc... I want simple, Ideally, I would like to find plans like this, but I'm not wild about the dormer design, I think two smaller dormers would look way better, and probably use less material overall.
I'm going to keep looking and see what I can come up with, I also need to look into the building codes, and make sure whatever plans I end up with are up to par.