1. Heat. My current home was built in 1940 with an addition somewhere in the 1980s. The original part of the house has no insulation on the outer walls. They are brick with plaster and lath as a inside finish on top of the brick. The addition probably has insulation in the walls, but with the vaulted ceilings and the way that they added on the vents, the temperature is always 10 degrees different than the other part of the house. In the winter it is colder than the old part of the house and in the summer it is hotter. When it gets really cold the furnace can't quite keep up. The temperature in the old part of the house where the thermostat is located is currently 62 degrees. It will get as high as 68 degrees when the sun is up, but that is as high as it will get. I know that other people leave their heat at 68-69 all winter and think that is a perfectly adequate temperature, but I am cold!
2. And speaking of cold, my kitchen floor is freezing. I don't know why. It is tile, which I know is colder than other flooring, but this is the coldest tile floor I have ever had. The new house will have wood floors in the kitchen and I have very high hopes that I will never have to step on a cold kitchen floor again.
3. Lights that work the way they are supposed to. The light in my kitchen has a short. Sometimes when you turn it on, it turns back off, so you have to go turn it on again. The light in my bedroom won't turn on unless the switch on the other side of the room is off. The switch on the other side of the room doesn't turn anything on, it just won't let the other switch turn on the light. The light to the guest bathroom is right outside the bathroom. Guests have a hard time finding it. And the little annoying old house things like having to go all the way across the room to turn on the light for that room. I know these are all minor annoyances, but it will be nice not to deal with them in the new house.
4. Hot water. It takes about 5 minutes to get hot water to any faucet in the house. Theoretically 1 of them should be close enough to the water heater to be a little faster, but no. 5 minutes minimum at any faucet.
5. Soft water. There just isn't a good way to implement it in the old house.
6. An oven that stays on. My current oven preheats and then turns off. About 5-10 mintues after it turns off you can turn it back on again. Sometimes when it is back on again it will stay that way and sometimes it will turn off again. It makes Thanksgiving more fun, guessing whether or not the turkey will be done and I have to tell you they say to bake cookies at 350 for a reason. They aren't quite the same when the oven temperature starts dropping.
7. I had some clients that were looking for a house and all they wanted was a 2 bum kitchen. They wanted a kitchen that they could both be in at the same time without running into each other all the time. My current kitchen is definatly a one bum kitchen. The new one is at least 4, maybe 5.
8. An enclosed back yard for the dog and the kids. Our garage was behind our current house and we had a guest house behind that. By moving it to the front, we are gaining a back yard that I can let the girls go out in without worrying about them being out of sight or being run over by someone coming up the driveway.
9. Windows that open. Some of the windows in the old house are original. They don't open. Some of them are relatively new casements with cranks that are broken. They don't open. I like fresh air every once in a while, so I am looking forward to windows that work the way they are supposed to.
10. And finally, my home office is going to have a door. I don't think there is any need to explain this one.
We did look into just remodeling the old house to get a little more room and fix the problems, but it was going to cost as much as building new and would still have some of the old house "charm". Another plus of moving back a little in the lot is that the trees in the front of the house will have more room to grow.
But all of this is just a little too much to explain to every contractor that walks in so I just smile and say "Yes we are."
