What does your ideal home look like?

My ideal home looks like any damn home that I can move into without significant work or extra costs upfront, while still being affordable in today’s stupid housing market.

That aside, I don’t know. I’ve seen so many homes online and liked different things about most of them that it’s hard to decide which things I liked most and how they would even fit together.

Starting from the outside, I’d love to have a big yard (both front and back) with a good amount of barrier trees around the edges and decent shade trees. Out here in South Dakota the wind gets nasty sometimes, and having barrier trees is especially important in winter when the snow is just blowing across the Great Plains. I’d also love it if there was some kind of lake front view from the back of the house, but that’s not a deal breaker. As for part of the exterior of the house, the back needs a covered patio of some kind, and it would be amazing if you could shut it up or screen it in (I recently saw something like this in some million dollar home in Colorado.) If the garage were detached I would want it to be large enough for some kind of workshop space.

Inside the house there would be only a couple of bedrooms and bathrooms. I would use one for an office space or maybe a hobby space depending on how the rest of the house turns out. If possible, that office space could also be lined with bookshelves and made into a little library. Also, have you seen those clips online of people building secret doors in their bookshelves? Definitely would want something like that, which could lead into a separate living room/entertainment space.

I shouldn’t forget to talk about the kitchen. Ideally, it would be spacious so that I can actually work in it when I’m trying to roll out pizza dough or something, and it needs a proper exhaust hood over the stove.

Okay, so a lot of the features I want are definitely a bit much, but some of them are more doable than others. Provided I find a basic home with enough space, I could probably add in the things I want myself and up the home value later. It’s just fun to think about this stuff sometimes.