I'm sure as a parent there is that little place inside of you that looks forward to the day when all the kids will be gone and you'll have your house back to yourself. Even as a mom of 5 young small children, I look forward to the day when I can have nice furniture again, knick knacks and glass decorative items.
Well my poor parents don't have that opportunity. When we were building our house, we didn't have enough equity in our current house to sustain a bridge loan. We had to sell our first house before we could even start building the new one. That left us a little dilemma of where to live. My parents graciuosly offered to let us live with them for the six months of building. I'm so thankful that we were able to live there, but as you can imagine, bringing two families together almost always bring stress with it. Not to mention that I gave birth to our second son while living in their house, so there was a newborn waking up at all hours of the night.
When we decided to sell the house that we built, we talked in depth with my parents about where we could go and how we would be able to afford to live and still get out of debt. I'm not sure who suggested it first, but we ended up discussing living with them again. Because of our experience the first time, my husband and I knew we did not want to live with them, but wondered if it would be feasible to live above them. We wanted the luxury of having our own space and the ability to have time to ourselves. We talked further about adding some sort of kitchen upstairs so that we could cook easy meals in a toaster oven or microwave and have a refrigerator available. In the end we came up with a plan on how we thought it could work.
My parents own a 2000 square foot colonial. Basically, my parents live on the first floor and we took the second floor. We added a door from the garage rafter area into the second floor so that we had our own entrance into the house and did not have to disturb them. If I haven't mentioned already, my husband has a history of carpentry, so we were able to do all of this "remodeling" ourselves. The other thing we did is took out the walls of one of the bedrooms and closet to open up part of the second floor into the kitchen and living room. We had three bedrooms, a full bath, and a kitchen/living room. We didn't have room for a dining table, so we built the countertops with an overhang and used two stools. We had 5 people in 1000 sq feet, so it was a little tight. Scratch that, we had 6 people in 1000 sq feet.
The sixth person was an au pair from Brazil. Quick rabbit trail... when we had a our daughter, day care became very expensive. An old boss of mine had an au pair at one point so I had learned a little about the process. It was actually cheaper for us to bring in an au pair than to have the 3 kids in day care.
For anyone who's not familiar with au pairs (pronounced 'o pair'), it is a government regulated student exchange program. A young adult (between 19-26 years old) comes to live with you from another country for a year. They are paid a weekly stipend and can watch children up to 45 hours a week. There are a number of agencies that facilitate this exchange program. The one that we work with (and love) is Cultural Care (http://www.culturalcare.com/).
This helped us solve a few issues, mainly cost, as I've mentioned, but also illness. We were having issues with our kids getting sick at day care and missing work over and over.
One of the regulations with an au pair is they have to have their own bedroom. So Fernanda was in one room, and the three kids in another, and my husband and I in the last.
We bought some cabinets cheap and put in a tiny kitchenette. We had our refrigerator, a sink, microwave, and toaster oven. Occasionally, we would go downstairs and use my parents oven or stove top.
It was tight, but it worked. My parents enjoy having the grand kids around too. Especially since they can still send them upstairs and have their own space. Although they'll probably never get away from the "herd of elephants" constantly pounding on their ceiling.
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