The decision is......

To stay.  After a lot of number crunching and an honest pro/con list for staying or leaving, staying in our current residence is the most prudent financial decision at this time.  That's not to say that things will not be happening at our house in, oh say, the next week!

We have committed to a contractor that can start next week.  We've talked about this as a possibility for so long, I now have some anxiety that it's finally coming to fruition.  The contractor, we'll call him Mr. D., asked us a lot of great questions: How big do we want the closets to be?, Do we need additional outlets in the rooms?, and the biggest question of all - What kind of flooring do you want in the bedroom? Well that question started a snowball.

The original hardwood floors are under the carpet in our bedroom.  We would like to salvage them and restore them back to their original glory.  When we replaced the pink carpet (yes, pink) with a beautiful, creamy frieze we were appalled at how previous owners used huge nails to probably remove squeaks from the floor.  At the time we made mention that it was a shame to ruin the floors like that.  Now, we that we want hardwood floors in the bedroom, we really cringe.  The decision to restore hardwood floors is not just for the bedroom.  Since we tend to be a go big or go home kind of family, the decision has been made to restore the hardwood in the whole house.  See the snowball getting bigger?

The final cost for the floors is slightly unknown at this point.  They will refinish what they can (for a decent per square foot price) and replace what is beyond its life (for a little more per square foot).  We also have an interesting situation with the status of the visible hardwood in the hallway in the kitchen.  The hallway planks run the length of the hallway in a north/south fashion, which makes complete sense.  When the flooring was installed, the kitchen was laid at the opposite east/west direction.  We're not sure on the logic for that.  Now that we want to expose and refinish the living room, which completes the circle from kitchen through the hallway we need to remedy this.  Mr. D. thinks that the kitchen could possibly be carefully taken up and turned the proper direction.  If it can't be properly taken up and turned we will have to replace it with new, but once we commit we're ready for that expense.  Snowball

To make the snowball just a bit bigger, and since work has to be done on the floor anyway, we are going to have a pocket door removed that's between the kitchen and living room.  It won't help us move our table into the kitchen, but it will give the feeling of more space.  Then maybe we can find a great bookshelf that will get my cookbooks off the floor of the hallway closet.  I'm getting ahead of myself, let's see how the whole thing turns out before I go finding a bookshelf.  That's a whole other snowball.