Putting my money where my mouth is

We've been contemplating moving out of the Bay Area for a while. Lately, we've been spending time in Ashland, OR, because that is one of the places we might consider moving to. In order to better evaluate living here, we've looked at a few homes to see how much we would have to spend to buy a house that we like in a neighborhood that we like.

A house we saw today fits most of what we would be looking for, but the main living area is small -- under 1000 sq. ft. There's a separate 1 BR basement apartment that is 800 sq. ft., so all together, the house is a bit bigger than our current house.

I've been espousing the idea of the Not So Big House, but now that push comes to shove, I'm not sure if I can follow through on that. Maybe if we were designing the house from scratch, I could live with just 1000 sq. ft., but given that space has already been allocated (and isn't easy to change), I don't know that I like their choices. I'd rather have a larger master bedroom, and a smaller kitchen, for example. However, it isn't easy to move "extra" space from one room to another in an existing house.

Maybe when it comes to buying an existing house, I'm more "Not So Huge" instead of just "Not So Big".

Ashland House, part II

Enough people have made some comments on my previous post that I thought I would clarify things a bit.

The house I was talking about does have a one-car garage, so there is some general storage that is available. I grew up in northern IL, and most of our cars never saw the inside of a garage even during the winter, so I'm not opposed to using the garage for storage. Part of the basement is probably available for storage as well (I think that the washer/dryer are there, shared with the basement apartment).

This house happens to be a "historic" house. I'm not sure exactly what that means in all cases, but it probably limits what we could do to the outside (for example, trying to expand one of the bedrooms probably wouldn't work, as that would not only affect the footprint of the house, but also would be visible from the street). On the other hand, "historic" houses have lower property taxes, so that is a good thing!

One unique thought I had was that we could use the basement apartment as a "master bedroom suite" during the winter, but move to the main floor and rent out the basement apartment as short-term rentals during the summer (Ashland's peak tourist season). During the winter (when we would be more likely to be spending time indoors), we'd have more space, but during the summer (when we're more likely to be out & about), we'd "make do" with smaller space in exchange for some rental income. The main problem with this approach is that as tdjohnsn points out, we won't really have a guest room during the time we would be most likely to have people who want to sponge off visit us. However, we could always put guests up in the office & disrupt our lives a bit.

All of this is just in the talking stage. We still need to decide if we actually do want to move from the Bay Area (and whether that involves keeping two houses or selling our current house and moving). After we've made that decision, then we'll have to decide whether we want to buy an existing house or build something ourselves. Maybe it would be possible to retro-fit in some of the "Not So Big" ideas, but that cost will have to factor into the cost of the house.