The "Must-Have" house building list

I'm not always a list writer.  But when I'm not, I'm just a list typer. Yeah.  Lists are good.

Lists turned out to kinda save us when we opted out of continuing to build a messed up home, and needed to find somewhere to hang our hat...and fast!

Thankfully our ill-fated attempt at building had prompted many and varied arguments productive discussions on what exactly are dreams/hopes/needs/wants in a house are.  We had all kinds of ideas of things that might be neat.  Not only that the builder had things he thought were neat :) and they thought getting us to pay more for any little neat thing was neat, too.  Because of this we ended up having meetings that went hours and hours with few decisions made or settled on.

We eventually came to the conclusion that we had only a few "must-have's" and much more "it might be nice's."  So we let the price go way up for the must-have's and were in the process of stressing over whether or not to make the price insane based on what might be nice.  Thankfully, I guess, we never had to really make all those decisions, but when it all came undone we were left with a pretty clear picture, as a couple, of what we were looking for in a home.

I may share our list of of both the must-have's and the want's just for funsies, sometime, but first today I thought it might be fun to share what our #1 must-have was:

A biggggggggg garage.  The house we had settled on building was tiny but the garage was slated to be huge (with plumbing and heating, no less ;).  We have lots of reasons this is important, but I think the number 1 was because our hobbies and passions involve building things, and while we are content to live in a little space and not own much stuff, we can't live in a world without creativity.  3 car garages are not essential to most people's creativity, but for us it was.  

In fact, not just the size but all kinds of functions of the garage have been really important for us in this house.  For any of you who are also big fans of the garage I wanted to point out the pretties at Garaga's garage doors.  

When Casey and I look at houses on walks or drives, I'm always noticing garage details, and I think getting doors like this would be so pretty.  I really love this one, especially with the stone.  The colors are really us.  In fact they look like the combo we are planning for our fireplace.

Anyway, I'll be back with more posts about our "must-have's" but for now....when you look at homes for the near or distant future, what is the #1 "must-have" on your list?