236 | Love Letters: Why a Kitchen and Living Room Remodel?
I wanted to write this before the project started, but life got in the way, and I’m writing it a little more than a week after we have moved back in.
It is hard to put myself back in the shoes of May 2025, but I still think this is better than not doing it at all.
So here is the love letter to my future self about our decision to remodel our kitchen and living room in the summer of 2025…
Why now?
It feels like we have deferred a kitchen renovation for eight years and it is time to do it to stay ahead of middle school and high school age kids needs
Our income level is at an all-time high and we don’t know if that will continue forever given the general uncertainty of life and career transition plans
Why not move?
It is hard to envision a different neighborhood that we would like to live in within Winston-Salem right now
Our mortgage interest rate is 2.75% and if we were to move and finance the purchase it would be in the 6.5% to 7% range
A move would introduce hard costs associated with the actual move as well as lifestyle creep costs associated with a bigger house in a different location - in some ways, it feels like we are capping our housing cost in ways that will provide significant flexibility for other parts of life that are more important to us
Restarting relationships with new neighbors and dramatically altering relationships with existing neighbors would be a tough pill to swallow
Our top priorities?
To create space to comfortably host and seat 8+ adults in our primary living space
To have an island in the kitchen
To extend the runway on this house and its viability for our family
Why not more?
We quoted a sunroom/living room over the existing deck and a second story on top of that and the entire project would have been between $300,000 and $350,000 - that felt like too much to commit to this house at this point in time, and it also seemed to take the house out of the current neighborhood price range
It seems like we could revisit a real addition of square footage at a future date as our family demands it as the layout of the kitchen would still allow us to easily transition to the deck if needed
We want to believe that our home choice forms our children in ways that are hard to see with a naked eye, and we don’t want our home to be out of place in the West Salem neighborhood
