Monday, March 2, 2009

Sleepless night

The camel's back is broken. Last night was the final straw. Let me back up and explain our situation. We live in a simple 3 bedroom ranch house. It is a nice size ranch. Our living room is quite large and open to our kitchen and dining room. This house will be plenty big enough when it is just my husband and I. We have a nice flat yard(big deal in hilly WV) and we live in a nice neighborhood. We just love our location.

However, when we bought the house we only had 3 blessed children. We did not intend to have anymore. I love that accidents happen, so to speak. I love that my little guy is here. But we bought this house thinking we were only going to have 3 children living in it. Before #4 came along our oldest had a room to himself and #2 and #3 shared a room quite well. But when #4 came along that all had to change.

The ages of our children has caused issues with room sharing. The 13 year old and 10 year old are simply at the age where they desire their own rooms. With the exception of the short time period before #4 came along they always shared a room and they are both ready for that to be over with. The fighting and bickering that goes with room sharing is wearing my husband and I down. You send them to their room for punishment and the other walks in and tempers flare...you tell them to clean their room and they bicker over who picked up what or left what trash where and so on. It is really draining on parents to listen to it all. I know many do and have, but there is more going on then just my two older ones.

Now our younger two are young enough to not mind sharing, but they are simply not compatible sleeping partners. Our third son has always been a restless child...waking up constantly...having occasional nightmares...climbing into our bed etc. Our littlest guy would sleep beautifully if his older brother did not wake him up with his issues. On the rare night that #3 is not waking up #4 will have issues and wake #3 up and so on and so on......

It is a constant nightmare for my husband and I. We are woken up every night by one child or another...sometimes 2 or 3 times. Our 3rd son can't help how he reacts when he is asleep to a nightmare. He simply jumps out of bed and swings his door open in absolute terror. This wakes #4 up. Of course, #4 is a good little sleeper, but he is young and 1 to 2 times a week he might wake up. You can usually sooth him quickly and get him back to bed quite soon, but during the whole soothing time #3 is waking up. It is a roller coaster ride that seems to never end! Last night I went nuts being up and down and dealing with the chaos of it all. I honestly don't see how my husband functions at work after nights like last night.

The remodeling that we are torn about doing is creating two bedrooms in our basement. We have about 2000 square feet of unfinished basement. It is very dry...has a sump pump and 8 foot ceilings and heating. Part of it does currently have carpeting and a ceiling. But the walls are simply painted cinder blocks. The other half is concrete flooring and exposed rafters...no drywalling at all. We have come up with a design plan that would give us a nice finished family room with two bedrooms that are 10X13 and 9X14 in size. The bedrooms would have to have egress windows and closets to be considered rooms.

We should completely do away with this whole plan until we are debt free. I know that..I keep saying that....but then night time comes and I am literally crying for more bedrooms for my kids.

After last night...I am broken...I want these rooms. I also want to remain credit card debt free. So what are we to do!!! My husband finally said we are going to go forth on this project. But we are not going to charge a dime.

What does this mean for my blog. Well, I am still paying monthly bills and I am not incurring debt on credit cards or home equity loans. I just don't know how quickly it will go down with just make standard payments. We have a few more things to come in with some dough--taxes, upcoming yard sale, and possible bonus money. We do not plan to dip into our emergency savings either. So far my husband has used his personal spending money to purchase wood for building a closet in the basement. Why a closet first...well we need to house our network somewhere. So this closet will be our network closet...housing our main computer and wiring for the house. Our house is completely networked and we have a heavy duty computer that stores most of our files/movies/mp3 etc. He is techy like that. We already have drywall in our garage so this part is inexpensive and easy. My husband is very good with electricity and wiring so we won't have to hire someone for a lot of this work. If we need things looked over then my uncle (an electrician) will do so free of charge. We paid an electrician a few years ago and had our whole house updated--we went from 100 amp to 200 amp service. So we were prepared to eventually finish this basement.

The biggest expense will be the egress windows. We will try and do most of the work ourselves. Still we are far off from purchasing those so I am not going to sweat it right now.

The point of this post is that we are going forth but we are going to go slow. It will probably take us a year to complete. I will post some pics along the way if you like. My husband thinks we could be done by late summer, but I am the one that is more realistic on these adventures and the time they take to complete than he is.

This will raise our homes value and bring MUCH NEEDED peace to this family. I just hope it won't bring more debt. That will be my goal..to do this without incurring any more debt as we pay on our auto loans and student loan. If you think these are way wrong choices feel free to share. But I think our decision is to do as I have stated.

3 comments:

  1. sometimes life just gets in the way of our good planning. It sounds like it's affecting everyone and the idea of creating the new rooms sounds like a practical solution that will also add some value to the house.
    don't beat yourself up about slowing down the debt repayment, it will be worth it for a happier family, I look forward to watching the pics of your progress :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Try putting one of the older ones with one of the younger ones, at least temporarily. I shared a room with my younger (by 13 years) sister for a while and loved it. She was basically a toddler at the time and I thought she was so cute!

    ReplyDelete
  3. We might just try that Stephanie. We have discussed it before. My 13 year old just tends to stay up later and I worry about him waking the little one up when he goes to bed. I am ready to try it though!

    ReplyDelete