Ben and I are hooked on home improvement shows. You name it, we've probably watched it at least once. We have dreams of someday buying the place we're renting from our landlords—as ridiculous as that sounds—and we've lived here long enough that we've come up with some ideas about what we'd do to the place if we owned it and had a large, untapped bank account.
There don't appear to be any glaring structural issues other than one long crack that runs through the concrete floor in the den. The bigger issue is the age of the house (built 1948) and all that date implies: knob and tube wiring, lead paint, asbestos-laden plaster, ancient plumbing lines, and asbestos insulation in the roof are the four that immediately come to mind—all of which would require a complete gutting-to-the-studs to (as Mike Holmes would say)—make it right.
Then there is the physical layout of the house. That is where the fun really starts. We've got so many ideas floating around that I knew I had to get them down in architectural form—even if nothing ever comes of it. (It's important to dream, after all.)
So I fired up AutoCAD and began the task of drawing our little house as it is and how we'd like it to be. Yeah, I'm a little rusty at it, and the latest version of the program does some things quite differently from how I remember it working back in the day, but on the whole I haven't forgotten nearly as much as I thought I had. Of course I haven't gotten into the really technical stuff like dimensioning and cross-hatching and whatnot, and I need to wipe some cobwebs from my basic architectural construction knowledge, but I'm sure it will all come back. If not, I still have my AutoCAD "bible" from years ago that got me out of many a "How do I?" jam even then.
And y'know, it feels damn good to be doing something creative. I didn't realize how much I missed that.