More space, less junk. Discuss

With £200k in mortgage debt and a sizeable salary to supplant, taking on additional financial burden would (you'd think) be the farthest thing from our minds. And yet, we're looking at spending upwards of £100,000 extending and renovating our already pretty spacious house. Why, you may well ask.

Space, the final frontier

It appears to be an almost inevitable side-effect of family life that the living accommodation you find yourself in becomes increasingly lacking in available volume over time. Kids get older and require bigger bedrooms; toys and nick-nacks are accumulated (always faster than ebay can offload them for you); and somehow what was once perfectly adequate storage capacity becomes insufficuent. At this point, most families declutter, maybe even move house, but we've decided to go down a different route. The area we're in is pretty much perfect for us - walking distamce to childrens schools; backs onto a nature reserve so very quiet; handy for commuting to most places - so we don't really want to venture too far from where we are. The house itself, while increasingly less fit for purpose, is pretty substantial and has a larger than average size garden (including some additional land we managed to secure at the rear). All in all, the logic is there to extend and renovate to give us the increased space we'd require to circumnavigate the time between now and the children being ejected from the nest. Under normal circumstances with stable, well-paid careers, dipping into some savings, and leveraging the equity built up in the property, this would be a no-brainer exercise to fund and execute a relatively large scale extension project (ok, the execution may be slightly more complex, but you take my point). But, aren't we trying to reduce our debt; control our spending; and achieve some financial independence, to the point of ditching the corporate career. Well, yes, actually.

Can we monetize it?

It's becoming a theme, but there's been a subtle shift in my brain that's resulted in me thinking about everything from the perspective of a money-making opportunity - need a new car? Wonder if I can sell advertising on it, or blog about the selection process; sick of some monotonous daily chore? Wonder if there's a way to automate it, and charge people to fulfil it for them. Now as annoying as that sounds, it does present some genuine opportunities, and we think this is one. Lots of people consider and execute extensions every year; they look for insight into the right approach; selecting tradesman; tools and materials; finishes and fittings. All of those areas are ones we could document during the process; and (probably more importantly) ones that could generate advertising clicks; affiliate links; or even just freebies to review. Given our penchance for efficient web sites and blogs, throwing something together to document our trials and tribulations might be a relatively simple way to bring in a few extra dollars and offset some of the mountain of additional outgoings we're likely to find along the way. Not to ignore the fact that it's likely to prove increasingly cathartic to document (and probably lament) the challenges we face and dilemmas we have to resolve to get ourselves to a point of a harmonious home.

A new baby is born!

With best intentions; a simple theme; our tried and trusted static site generator (we really must blog more about that, it's evolving into a great little tool); and a long-list of topics (wow there's a lot to house extensions), we took the plunge.

www.therenovationdiaries.com was born.

Initially, it's pretty simple - post the stuff we're doing, monetize by adsense - but we expect it to flourish as we get into the crux of the endeavour and offer up some opportunities around list-building; affiliate and partner advertising; etc. We'll report back as things progress.