Beware idle talk about an addition... you might end up doing one

How exactly did we end up ready to do an addition? I was in the backyard the first summer after we bought our house, talking about ideas of home renovations for the future. In my head, they were for the very far future (and some were probably things that would never come to fruition).

I mentioned turning the sunroom into a fully functioning, heated and air-conditioned part of the house. Then I made a comment about how it would be nice if we could do an addition that would create a laundry room and a full master bathroom. I proceeded to walk over the the end of the house that we will soon be expanding and start to envision how it would work. After some thought I came up with a decent plan that would also provide additional closet space, and the idea took off.

Although we haven't broken ground yet, the process has already had some bumps. I worked with my Dad and he used my ideas to draw up building plans, only to find out that the current setback requirements wouldn't work with that. We ended up appealing to the town zoning board for a variance and got it (after a small mountain of paperwork, hand-delivering notices to 30 or 40 neighbors, running an announcement in the paper, and showing up at a board meeting to plead our case). After that we had to go through the standard permit approval process (more bureaucracy), and now we just have to hope we can hang on to our sanity.