Tuesday, August 17, 2004

Dreams

So I had the strangest dream last night. I've been having vivid dreams lately, but they are more the normal type of "regular world twisted" dreams. Last night's dream was a bit different in that it actually contained a good idea.

I may have mentioned that Eric and I live in a house we like to call "Frankenhaüs" (or Frankenhouse, I've never worked very hard on the spelling). Before we bought it, it was apparently owned by a do-it-yourselfer who wasn't very good at doing it. In short, pretty much everything we've had to get fixed in the house was either a direct result of this guy's incompetence or we discovered more of his mistakes while repairing.

For instance, when the water heater went out we called for a technician who said it was pretty much dead, then when he started to install the new one we heard him exclaim in shock. When we questioned him, he said that the wires had all been put in wrong, and the heater wasn't grounded. In addition, the wrong type of pipe had been used as a shunt to one section. The tech said that because he hadn't noticed the problems when he took out the old one, he wasn't going to charge us extra to fix them. Then he said we were lucky that we'd never been hit by a power surge while we were in the shower.

Anyway.

To make a short story long, Eric and I have often discussed expanding the house just a little to add a laundry room and maybe some extra storage. We've always considered the best place to expand as the back yard, right behind the kitchen. The big problem with that is that the yard slopes upward fairly quickly, but there's a decent area that's flat enough that, if we had any money, an addition could be built on it.

In my dream, however, the addition went into the front yard. We currently have a small area of the front fenced off. The old owner had a hot tub in there at one point. In the dream, we simply used that area to build out a bit.

Ok, so there were some weird bits. Like when I went out to measure it was my parents house instead of ours, and when we installed the new bathroom it looked like a school locker room, but the core idea isn't really that bad.

Three rooms would be impacted, instead of two, but one of the rooms is the bathroom, which would be really nice to expand a little (and get a new tub!). During the construction we could fix the drainage problems by installing a nice cleanout, since that's right in the same area. The tree that caused our lovely power problems could be moved or removed. If we could move the water heater, that would be even better, but I would suspect that would take a lot more effort. In short, it's not a bad idea, considering that it bubbled up from my subconscious in a dream.

And adding a little bit to the back of the house wouldn't be out of the question, either. A nice little addition to house a hot tub, maybe...