Our whole house is like 1,500 square feet. I'm supposed to paint this summer.
Our whole house, except one room, is off-white. Because lazy.
1,500 is way bigger than our new bedroom. So glad I'm not excessive.
What is the difference in square footage between your old bedroom & your new one?
Or rather, what is the square footage of each?
Hmm. Old room is probably 10x15, new room is maybe 10x10? I could actually measure.
All four kids are out of the house this week.
In a couple of months, I'll have no kids living at home at all.
We moved to a new flat/apartment in April. The first time we've owned one. It's about 900 square feet, which is small by US standards, but actually quite big for a London flat. I think my son's room is the smallest at about 10' x 13'.
I had to redecorate the whole thing in a week, including filling and sanding the amazingly large number of holes, gouges, scrapes, etc that the sellers had left in the walls. It wasn't fun. It was basically dawn until dusk every day. As a result every wall and ceiling is white, as I could just bulk buy the paint and not worry about cleaning rollers or brushes as I moved between rooms.
I like the idea of yellow, though. We've talked about doing one wall yellow in our room.
I could just bulk buy the paint and not worry about cleaning rollers or brushes as I moved between rooms
My reasoning exactly.
We moved to a new flat/apartment in April. The first time we've owned one.
Do you have HOAs there? How do common expenses / governance work?
(I am in the utter pits of HOA governance atm. And I'm the President!)
I guess you'll have to try to destroy Los Angeles then.
More googling suggests it's not like US condos, it's "leasehold flats" where you own a 99-year lease to your flat, there is still a landlord who owns the rest of the building & probably the land & determines charges for building expenses.
And the Starmer government wants to replace leasehold with "commonhold," which would bring the joys of HOA governance to the Isle.
That's certainly how it works with my flat in London- the residents used our legal right to take over management from the freehold owner, so we sort out maintenance and insurance ourselves. All the freehold gets from us is the leasehold payment every year which is pretty small.
You can also force the freehold owner to extend your lease (for an upfront payment).
In a couple of months, I'll have no kids living at home at all.
And how many of your children are vampires?
My house has at least seven different colors of paint on the interior walls. Four of them came with the house or were added by us personally within a month of buying it, I don't remember exactly, and another three were added to what is now the kid's room when it became a nursery. It came with so many colors partly because it wasn't flipped, which we appreciated.
I'm having second thoughts about it now, though. We've been planning renovations for years. It would be nice to have more living space, we only have 1156 square feet and the main idea was adding a third story to the house, and also just to use the space we have better. But plans stalled for years for one reason or another, and it would seem very risky to do them now, given that Cassandane directly works for the federal government and I'm a contractor. In the meantime we've put off lots of small and medium projects, hoping we could do them along with the big projects, but now that seems less certain.
We're about to start a house renovation. Our house is tiny -- about 800 sq ft -- but our lot is also very small, so we'll only be adding on a hundred or so square feet and then just reconfiguring the interior space to be more useful.
It's very fun to review architectural plans! But the most fun part is shopping for tile. I found this beautiful creamy avocado terrazzo tile with flecks of harvest gold. It's very expensive, but the world is ending so I may as well spend all my money.
Our lot is too small for us to have chickens.
Our neighbors have chickens. I don't know how big their lot is, but they seem to just let the chickens roam around in the street.
I was hoping you'd know if they did.
And how many of your children are vampires?
I stuffed their mouths with garlic before I buried them in the crawlspace, so hopefully none.
re: 13 / 14
Yeah, we pay a management company for all of the collective maintenance, etc. They are OK and the service they provide is reasonable. The fee isn't cheap, but it's not as extortionate as some. I think it's going to work out at around 8% on top of our other housing costs. That includes building maintenance, parking enforcement, gardening, maintenance of the children's play area, etc.
We did have to pay some money to get our lease changed, because post-Grenfell and after a lot of scandals with management companies and freeholders abusing the system, banks are quite wary of relatively permissive leases. We had ours changed to limit the possible ground rent increases to RPI or less, with a long review period, so it's fixed for the next 10 years.
There is a building "board" which is made up of people who live here. They have oversight of the accounts for the building and supervise the work of the management company. They did fire a previous management company about 5 years ago, so we aren't stuck with whoever the freeholder wants us to use.
Do you vote for the building board? Or is it just whoever volunteers?
And do you pay for structural issues, like contribute to reserves for repairs etc.?
The standard way to do this is to start a company that owns the building freehold and grant each flat shares in the company. Then you do a shareholder meeting and elect a board with a company secretary, managing director etc. This is why I am technically a company director. In my experience you still have a lease but it's a form of words as you're both landlord and tenant, although it does provide a way of enforcing whatever rules the freeholders come up with.
Yes, we absolutely fucking do contribute to structural issues, I pay an absolute fortune into ours (weird 1920s block with shaky infrastructure), some of which goes to current expenses and some into the reserve fund, which a previous secretary stole and went on the run with his average year's salary takings before conveniently dying. We should probably re-tender the management but we're also in the process of getting a new storey built on top of the block to finance a major renovation and incidentally to pacify the various freeholders who wanted to get the mobile phone infrastructure off the roof although they're all landlords and don't live here but still want to do nimby bullshit here.
Leasehold itself is cancer and can't be abolished quickly enough although the classic form is a 999 year lease, a workaround of the Rule against Perpetuity for the numerous lawyers present and also a way of converting an older form of land tenure into the current legal order. See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyhold and keep pushing 'til you reach the bit where you learn some parts of the country had matrilineal inheritance by the youngest.
Yeah, you guys did your regicide too early.
re: 29
Yes, and yes. Although most of the recent structural repairs have been paid for by the original builder (the building is 12 years old) and there was an NHBC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_House_Building_Council) case that means that some other repairs are going to be covered by the builder.
But yeah, we pay our annual fee and some of that goes into a reserve for repairs. If there was any major repairs that were bigger than that reserve, we'd have to pay a share.
I found this beautiful creamy avocado terrazzo tile with flecks of harvest gold.
Please get this so I can live vicariously through you.
Isn't it gorgeous? They have a lot of pretty tiles. This one is probably too grandiose for our house, but maybe we could have one little jewelbox bathroom.
I'm not being realistic about the cost. There will be plenty of time for realism later; I'm enjoying the fantasy phase of remodel planning.
How much can one tile cost? Ten dollars?
34: Yes, wow. My great-grandfather used to say, "in time, you remember the quality and forget the cost," if you need egging on.
We splurged on bathroom tile two years ago from these guys: https://blackrockstudio.ca/tile-gallery/
and I do not regret it one bit, but that may have been pre-inflation prices.
My childhood bathroom had something very like the avocado terrazo. I came to loathe it greatly.
I still adore the decor in my childhood home! Especially the pink marble counters in one particular green tile bathroom.
Room update: I feel ambivalent about the paint color. And my kinda-big beloved wardrobe doesn't fit without blocking the drawers under the bed from opening, so it's going to have to be repurposed elsewhere, and I'm using a cubby-shelving unit instead. It's all kinda a bummer.
But at least Apo has no parenting responsibilities, bizarrely good health luck, needs 4 hours of sleep per night, and is set to chillax in Mexico on a beach somewhere for the rest of the Trumpacolypse.
Count no man lucky until he has a dog the shits pot.
I don't know why a cat that shits pot isn't acceptable. They keep their shits in a neat box.
My childhood home had such good tile. All the tile was great (the kitchen had beautiful mosaic tile in all the colors of the midcentury rainbow) but my favorite was probably the bathroom. Light pink, with borders and bullnoses in dark red-purple tile. Some of the pink tiles had doodles of hand-painted little fish, which were chased by larger fish. Next to each of these tiles was a tile with a very big fish with a huge gaping mouth, ready to eat the other fish.
Is it wrong to push Mennonites down the stairs? Like, if you're in a hurry.
Conservative Mennonites or Old Order Mennonites?
I still haven't worked out the final details with my employer, but the best I'll be able to do is 180 days per calendar year in Mexico unless I retire. Which, if the economy continues to exist, is in about 3-4 years, so I can only chillax part time.
This would have all been so much more convenient if the republic could have held on for just one more presidential cycle before going tits up.
Here is a question I have about many of the currently fashionable tiles, both the textured ones and the zellige tile: don't they gather grime in all the little nooks? Some of them look quite lovely, but I want to know how much harder they are to keep clean.
Ours is not sufficiently textured in that way, but also I suspect I would never notice if it did happen.
I bought a bunch of iridescent pool tiles to put in my shower but I haven't done it yet.
No. They're just stick on tiles that I'm going to put on top of the existing tiles. If it's a huge failure I'll be sad but the bathroom will still work.