4600 Sq. Ft., 4 People - Two Adults, 12 year old, 9 year old. One 90 pound lab. 5 bedrooms, 3.5 baths, home theater, 3 car garage, pool.
So this is the story of how we ended up with a McMansion. We had a 2100 Sq Ft 3/2 with a two car garage that wouldn’t really fit two cars. I work from home, and was pretty much forced to work in the master bedroom. There were times I felt like the kids were on top of us. We didn’t have a guest room and my parents live out of state.
I wanted an office. My wife wanted a pool. My parents actually thought sleeping in a race car bed was cool, but we wanted a guest room.
I looked at finishing our upstairs with 2 more bedrooms and adding a pool. We were looking at 120k in spend, and based on comps adding about 30k to the value of our house. And we would still be stuck with a “2 car” garage that fit one car.
We started looking at what was in the market in our school district. The next logical step was the 3000 Sq. Ft range. Houses in this range were generally 4/2.5 with a two car garage and sometimes a bonus room. We can make this work, we would have to do double duty with an office/guest room. Some of them had pools. None of them had three car garages.
While we were driving around we found a house in a neighborhood we thought we couldn’t afford. It had been on the market, but the water heater burst and did a ton of damage. The owner already lived out of state, one of my buddies was his brother and babysitting the renovation after the water damage. 5/3.5 with bonus room, pool, three car garage. The owner just wants to unload this thing as soon as possible after the repair. The water heater damage caused him to miss summer relocation season after his buyer fell through.
We put it under contract at 95 a square foot, got to pick our finishes (paint, hardwood) and got everything we wanted out of a house. The place next door just sold for $109 per sq ft and is the same size.