Second look

Yesterday I got the opportunity to go inside a home that Spouse & I almost bought 6 years ago. Only it didn't look a thing like it did when we were considering it.

When we were looking for a full-time home in DE I knew I'd be working from an office in our home and thought it would be great to have a water view that office/home. Water views don't come cheap so our choices weren't plentiful. We even considered homes that were not 'our style' and that needed updating, with the idea that we could always make the home into what we wanted as long as it had that view.

So we got pretty serious about this contemporary-style home because it backed to a lake and had its own dock. This is the back of the home.
I even drew a floor plan of the home, complete with a 2-story addition on the left side so we could add a proper master suite and use the existing master bedroom (near the kitchen) as a formal dining room. The 2nd floor of the addition would have another guest bedroom and an office that overlooked the lake.

But before we'd made a decision on the home, someone else purchased it. A few months later I felt validated when I saw the new owner was remodeling and adding on, just as we had planned to do. Today, the back of the home looks like this: Another of the remodeling projects we'd planned was to enlarge the kitchen space and put in a completely new kitchen, because the existing kitchen:was not "our taste". Again I felt validate to find that the current owner not only enlarged and replaced the kitchen, they even moved it to a different place in the house. This is what the new kitchen looks like:
The expansion and remodeling of the home made it almost unrecognizable to me. There used to be 3 bedrooms, now there are 5. There used to be 2 bathrooms, now there are 3.5. There used to be a combo living/dining space, now there is a dining area, breakfast area, and living room complete with a beautiful stone fireplace.

Its pretty amazing what you can do with a talented architect and a full wallet.