Tales of a First-Time Home Buyer: The Most Popular Room

We love our new house, and we have now spent almost two months here. My favorite room is the man cave downstairs… yeah, the one with the beautiful TV and the comfy couch. What’s not to like? But the room we spend the most time in is the kitchen/living room.

We love the wide-open space of the living room and kitchen. Its a combination of living space and functional space, where we can be comfortable at the same time. There’s enough room in the kitchen for both of us to cook at the same time, and there’s enough room for both of us to relax on the couch at the same time, or any combination of the two. I would prefer it to be me relaxing on the couch, but actually I’m the one who makes dinner most nights because I get home much earlier than my wife. Shucks. Now that doesn’t mean I’m a good cook – my wife is the chef – but I’m getting much better and my ultimate goal is to become a grillmaster. I love cooking on the grill and I will continue to have lots of practice.

We also love the way the kitchen looks. We decided to invest in upgrades like the granite countertops. Although hard to keep sparkling clean, they look great and really give the kitchen the modern look we were looking for. Plus, many other homes in our neighborhood were choosing this upgrade and from our experience looking for homes ourselves, we know that granite and stainless steel are the new buzz words, and we'd probably regret not investing in such upgrades when it came time to sell. So yes, we also sprung for the stainless steel appliances. The kitchen, however, is where the upgrades end. The living room flooring is carpet – we wanted the hardwood flooring, but we had to draw the line somewhere. In retrospect, the living room is where we spend the most time and perhaps we should have ponied up the dough for the hardwood flooring. But I think all in all we made some wise decisions with the money we had.

We are planning to eventually get a small kitchen table for the kitchen area to make it an “eat-in” kitchen. We have a dining room, but when its just the two of us we tend to sit on the couch in the living room and watch TV while we eat. All my regular readers will already know that my parents have been visiting for the last three weeks, so the dining room has been used a lot more than normal for dinner. But what is “normal?” We lived here for a month and a half and my parents have been here for three weeks. There really is no “normal” yet.

Another upgrade we would like to eventually pursue is adding a deck off of the kitchen/living room. It will extend our “living” space that much further, and I won’t have to run all the way downstairs to use the grill. It will also add a lot of value to the house and make it much more attractive to prospective buyers; however, it is a major expense and we just aren’t quite ready yet. But someday.

For now I guess we’ll just have to live in our Brand New Kitchen just the way it is. Gee, I think we can handle that.