Future House Plans

This week it was my wonderful husband's job to choose our date night and to come up with the activity for the evening. I have to admit I truly enjoy the time that we spend together doing things other than simply crashing on the couch in front of the television or watching a movie.

As usual the activities for the evening were a complete secret. This definitely seems to be a trend developing in our date night planning. Whoever is charge of the activities is deeming it necessary that the details of the activity be mum until later in the day.

So this week's date night occurred yesterday. As it turned out it was "create a future house plan" night! We had a blast. Both Josh and I have long since agreed that we love our little house, but that within a few years we'd like to build a much nicer, and larger home out in the country.

We've agreed that we definitely want to have 3 to 4 acres of land for Rachel, Shayne and Abby to enjoy as well as for hoped for children.

But last night I think we found two home plans that we both agree outline exactly what we'd like in a home. The house plans we decided were the best averaged about 3500 square feet. We anticipate for what we'd like in a home it will honestly take between 3500 and 4000 square feet.

Some of the dreams that we have for the home we will build one day are that it will have a large porch out front. Josh would like the family entrance to have mudroom and a garage. We both want to have separate Den and Living room areas. We'd also like to have a library with built in floor to ceiling bookshelves.

I'm determined that our house needs to be at least two stories tall and would prefer that all of the bedrooms be on the upper level. As a result Josh is adamant that the laundry room will also be upstairs. Storage is an absolute must!

All in all, we'd really like to have no less than a 4 bedroom 3 bathroom house, but anticipate we may desire and need one that has 5 bedrooms and 4 1/2 bathrooms.

Also as we looked at plans last night we realized that it would be smart to build in an in-law suite into our home. Neither set of our parents are getting any younger and we both have younger sisters that depend upon us a lot. So building in an in-law suite enables us to have room for whoever needs it, when they need it. It also gives us the freedom to have my whole family visit without really any limits in our home.

Amazingly we found a plan that meets almost all of our needs and desires. Our favorite plan does have five bedrooms and four and half baths. It has a library, den, living room, formal dining room, upstairs laundry room, eat-in kitchen and potential in-law suite. There's a deck out back, but no front porch or mudroom. We'd have a gathering area/play area upstairs between all the bedrooms that (are all upstairs). Every bedroom has a walk in closet. Two of the smaller bedrooms share a bathroom and one of the smaller bedrooms has a bath of its own. The master bedroom suite is impressive. Not only does it have a extremely large bedroom, but it has a sitting area that is a separate room, which would double as a nursery while the children are young. The walk in closets is impressive and master bath with whirlpool is more than adequate.

All in all, the plans are a dream come true. The plans do fall within our expect size ratio and so this dream seems all the more real, now. Don't get me wrong, we aren't breaking ground or even purchasing the land for our dream home anytime within the next few months, but it was fun to find our dream home nonetheless. And it was even more exciting to realize that we agree upon what we're looking for. Who knows...five years from now, I wouldn't be surprised at all to be blogging from the den of the home I just described.

Wow! Needless to say it was another WONDERFUL date night! I can hardly believe how quickly these few nights have inspired even our normal evenings together. I'm so happy that we both began creating interesting activities for each other, every week.

Speaking of interesting activities, I'm looking forward to tomorrow's. Not only are we planning on attending the Maundy Thursday service at church together tomorrow, complete with foot washing, but we are even going to dye Easter eggs together as husband and wife for the first time tomorrow. We even have glitter and tie dyed egg dye.

So assuming that the refrigerator doesn't the stove to become an incubator so the eggs can hatch into chickens wanting their feet washed for Maundy Thursday, I'll tell you all about our Easter egg dying festivities and foot washing fiascos, tomorrow.