Watch Out for that Bar of Soap, Everybody

We started this conversation with a garage.

We've owned two houses in Madison County. Neither one has had a garage. We'd like to build one here, but we're just not sure we've got the room. Well, we've got the room, but it would take out a pretty good chunk of our backyard.

So the other option is to up and decide that we've outgrown this house and move on. But the local real estate market is pretty weak. The one house that's sold in the neighborhood was sold by a couple who owned it outright, owned another house outright, and thus could afford to discount said house heavily. We can't do that without eroding into any possible down payment on a new place.

Then there's this: There's some work that needs to be done on this house in order to make it sellable. The back deck, for one, is falling apart -- we needed to replace it when we bought this place ten years ago. And the kitchen is an ugly 1970s mess. I got to looking at kitchen cabinets today, and figure we'd have to spend between $1,800 to $2,000 to replace what we've got with a few minor additions which we counted on doing if we were going to redo the kitchen anyway -- and that excludes countertops and the floor. I can do the majority of the labor, it's just getting the money for the materials and then having to pay someone for a little bit of plumbing and the countertops; I won't do those.

Then there's this other difficulty: Once all that work is done, do we want to sell or revel in the new appearance of the kitchen? It's a slippery slope, everybody.