sarameg has given me house lust, and I am window shopping (because I have no downpayment.

I am seriously in love with the kitchen in this house. All I want in the world is an original kitchen.

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Also, as you can see, the price is reasonable and if I had any savings at all I would be checking out purchasing. It is in a semi-bad neighborhood, but to be honest, almost all neighborhoods here are semi-unsafe.

Sully is one of Henry's friends. (He kissed Nikki the barmaid before leaving the Cannery to try for the sailboat. )

If you use the br thing - I think you can keep spoiler font on all paragraphs - but if you use a hard return you lose spoiler font.

It's a really cute house! The woodwork!

I wonder if the cabinets are metal. If so, they look just like the ones in the house I grew up in. I will say, I would never have metal cabinets again, even if refinishing them was as easy as sending them to a car painting company.

It's interesting to me that new kitchen/bathroom are such a huge thing in selling homes. I kinda get the bathroom, especially when it comes to adding one (I will someday do that here, in the basement) but if the kitchen is functional, I don't get it. But then, I'm not a big cook or anything. I appreciate a well organized and laid out kitchen, but when I was looking, brand new kitchen was not a selling point with me. Every time I saw one, all I could think of was the $$$ it added to the asking price. Especially if I felt like it wasted space to include fancy appliances. Mine isn't new, but it isn't that old, either. Could definitely use space better, and someday I'll probably do something about it but a) workable for now and b) if I do it sooner, I won't feel like I'm throwing away money.

Found out colleague did indeed die. Surgical complications. Hadn't worked closely with him in many many years, but it is still shocking.

sara, I'm sorry to hear about your colleague. yikes!

I kinda get the bathroom, especially when it comes to adding one (I will someday do that here, in the basement) but if the kitchen is functional, I don't get it. But then, I'm not a big cook or anything. I appreciate a well organized and laid out kitchen, but when I was looking, brand new kitchen was not a selling point with me.

After helping to design one for myself and getting it brand new I can't imagine ponying up to pay for a new one that someone else made the decisions about!

Am still at work...close to being done though. sheesh. proposals.

The thing is, with houses in my price range, the remodel seems to entail replacing the cabinets with some "oak" cabinets, and nothing else. I would rather have vintage.

love the house.

I'm a sucker for a good kitchen, but as long as it has what it needs, I have cooked in some far from ideal conditions

That is shocking. What a way to find out about it.

I think that there are many, many craptastic kitchens that are poorly laid out, have neither enough storage space or counter space that it totally makes sense to me that good kitchens bring money.

Having spent the past two springs looking at apartments and houses, "new kitchen" does not mean "good kitchen". Just about every renovated kitchen I saw, with their fancy marble counter tops, state-of-the-art dishwashers and ovens and new cabinets and hardwood floors, were still poorly laid out, lacking in taste (or, *my* taste) and all around pretentious. I'd rather put the money in directing how the kitchen looks, rather than swallow someone else's disinterested style.

When we were selling the house in Long Island, the realtor told us to fix what was broken, but don't sink any money into aesthetic renovations.

The cats are smooshed together face-to-face, snoozing away, and I want to squish them so very badly.

I think that there are many, many craptastic kitchens that are poorly laid out, have neither enough storage space or counter space that it totally makes sense to me that good kitchens bring money.

My kitchen, in terms of the quality of most of the materials, is quite good, but its layout is spectacularly bad. It's a good sized kitchen with not enough linear counter space in usable places, a miserable work triangle, too much space between the cooktop and the sink, but not enough room to put a work island in the middle to create an alternate work triangle or double triangle.

But like I said, the quality of materials is very good (and pretty and in my taste) so I don't want to go tearing it up in order to make it more usable. The one thing I'm probably going to do in the next few months is get a new dishwasher, since the one we have is crap.

I was shocked to see, in those house-flipping shows, how renovating the kitchen always brought in more money than the renovations cost.