Real Talk: The Death Of A Dream (Letting Go Of Perfect, Accepting The Good)

Last night, I looked back at the most recent “final floor plan” that I could find that showed the final version of the floor plan of the addition I’ve been dreaming about for the last ten years. My ideas for the addition went through many changes over the years, but I’m pretty sure this was the last one.

For comparison, this is what our floor plan looks like right now. The little room to the back of our main bathroom that is solid black is the original master bathroom that is completely inaccessible right now, but my new plan is to make that accessible again instead of tearing it down.

At the beginning of 2025, I made my list of home goals for that year, just as I have done for the last several years. On that 2025 list, I said the following:

Y’all, I feel like this is the year that I’ll finally be able to say goodbye to the sunroom.

I have been wanting to tear this room down for years, but it’s where my washer and dryer hookups have been all these years, and it’s also where our hot water heater is located. But once our closet/laundry room combo is finished, I’ll no longer need this room for a laundry room. And once my workshop is organized, I’ll no longer need to store tools and supplies in the sunroom. That just leaves the hot water heater. And I would be absolutely ecstatic if I could…

1. Have a tankless water heater installed,
2. Have French doors installed at the back of the music room (which we’d have to do anyway, temporarily, while the addition is being framed, so why not do that sooner than later?), and then
3. TEAR DOWN THE SUNROOM!!!!!

Y’all, I want to make that happen so badly!!! I want that room gone. I feel like the back of our house is really starting to shape up now that the carport is finished and usable, the driveway is poured, and the workshop will soon look very cute. But this sunroom is such an eyesore. Even if we can’t build the addition this year, I still want the sunroom gone. I have been anxious to tear that room down for so long now, and it would be such a momentous occasion if I could make that happen this year.

Well, 2025 came and went, and the sunroom was still there. When it came time for me to make my 2026 list of home goals, you’ll notice that tearing down the sunroom was no longer on my list. I had started to have a change of perspective, but here’s what I said about it:

I hate this room so much, and believe me, I’d love nothing more than to tear it down ASAP. But the fact of the matter is that we need a space for our workout equipment. So until we’re ready to start building our addition, the room needs to stay, and we need to use it as a temporary home gym.

Temporary. That’s the key word. That’s the word I was hanging onto with clenched fists. I still wasn’t willing to keep the sunroom long term, but I could live with it and make use of it temporarily. I was planning the absolute cheapest makeover humanly possible, pretty much sticking to removing the carpet and coating everything in a fresh coat of paint. But in the end, I still wanted it gone.

And then, just over a month ago, my mindset evolved a bit more, and I wrote a post about how I wanted to do a little more than the very basics. I wanted to go ahead and replace the drafty windows and sliding door that won’t completely close to make the room more comfortable while we are making temporary use of the room.

But those new windows and door would be ordered in the right sizes so that they could be removed when we tear down the sunroom and then they could be installed in the new addition. So even just a month ago, I was holding on to that dream of the addition as tightly as I could.

Fifteen days after writing about new windows and a new door for the sunroom, I posted about opening up that hidden bathroom to the sunroom so that we could have a second full bathroom in the house, which would be accessible on this wall where the white rectangle is.

And then eight days after that, I wrote about building a deck that would be accessible through the exterior door in our bathroom. And that deck would sit right in the way of that future addition.

I think you can see where this is going. And I’m sure many of you probably got there much faster than I did. You’ve seen the progression of my thoughts and plans, and I’m sure you were thinking, “There will never be an addition if she does these things.”

And yet, it’s only been within the last few days that I’ve realized what I’ve doing over these last few months. I’ve been slowly but surely letting go of the dream of an addition, and with one new plan after another, I’ve been slowly trying to convince myself that letting go of that dream is okay. It will be fine. But I think I had to let go of it slowly, gradually, over the course of a few months. And then all of a sudden.

And that’s the end that I’ve reached over the last few days. I finally reached the “sudden” end of that slow, gradual, step-by-step letting go process. I can see it now. There won’t be a new addition. And while it actually pains me to write that because it’s been a dream for over ten years now, I’ve actually made peace with it.

In fact, I hit that bottom of disappointment, and I’ve already started on my way back up to excitement. I’m excited about the challenge of turning that sunroom and that awful bathroom into something usable, amazing, and permanent. But that means that we’re actually going to have to put more money into it than I had originally planned. It won’t be anything near what a complete tear down and new addition would cost. But it’s going to cost a heck of a lot more than tearing out carpet and coating everything with a new coat of paint.

The main issue is that if that room is going to become a permanent part of our home, it has to be level with the rest of the house, so the floor has to be raised. And if the floor is raised, the roof has to be raised also. And while I can’t envision myself doing either of those things myself, that means that I’ll have to find other ways to keep costs as low as possible. And that means loads of DIY. I think I’m up for it. I’m ready to face the challenge. And I’m actually pretty excited about it. I think in the end, it will be good. It won’t be perfect, but I’m okay with that. I’d rather live with the good than spend another decade putting off the good while continuing to dream about the perfect.