White-tail spider in my track suit pants WHICH I WAS WEARING! I thought it was a lump of lint from the laundry, drew it out, and promptly flung it across the room once I realised... never to be seen again! How it didn't bite me and sat still to be picked up, I don't know - it must have known I wouldn't do it any harm. We lived in lots of country places, too... We were invaded by small black crickets one year, and lady bugs, another year, in your drawers, in your hair, in your pantry, in your undies... everywhere! And then the blue tongue lizard that would go in and out with our dogs via doggie door, and made itself a nest in our laundry... I gave up and left some old towels for it. Had an echidna get up into the wheel well of our car... wild brumbies in our patio... the list goes on. My husband still says that the most unwelcome visitor was his mother... I like her better than he does!

You need to start 2sep ideabooks for kitchen and laundry, on your homepage. Go to photos up top of this page, plug in your specs. Then Houzzers will know what your style is. Secondly, plans and photos are needed. Do 2sep design dilemmas, for each room. I will look out for them.

Thank you dohraime. I like you hypothesis about step feature at the gable front and art deco era. I think that was probably the closest this I could find at this stage in terms of visual similarity. The living area connected to the kitchen was extended back probably around 70s-80s. As far as we know, the Italian gentleman had a big family with four kids, so he needed more space for beds. The other two rooms at the front may have been renovated at some point as well. Cornices in the front three rooms including hall way definitely look more elaborate than one in the extension area. We have only three windows left to us that was from the era of original owners. They were time double hung windows that were very old, very fragile, and difficult to open. These three were at the two front rooms and a kitchen as pictured in 2010 and 2014 sales. As far as I can see from the old pictures of 2010 sales, windows in the extension living room were double hung windows of the same style as well. So they may have been replaced at some point in time. Previous owner replaced most of the windows to double glazed units, and we completed the remaining three after moving in last year.

@Tribble - the situation is the same in Em Bee's part of the world as in ours. Aging demographic, lots of immigration and also internal migration, and of course offshore buying. But where I live, the issue isn't so much competition, as the inability of builders/developers to read the market. Our own builder (small builder, one project at a time, some of them industrial, not housing) told us that the two-story houses in our town were simply not selling that quickly, whereas the one-story houses were listed and gone. (He sold us our house before he tore down the old one, and sold the other house on the block about 3/4 of the way through the build and before it was ever listed. The two story house around the corner from us was on the market for 8 months). I'm not a huge fan of government intervention in housing (I saw public housing in the UK and that was not a good thing) but I do think strong regulation on foreign property buyers is appropriate. That said, I also think the builders need to get their heads together and recognize that there's a boomer population that has a bit of money and wants something different than the bog-standard two-storey box house. Time for the developers to catch up. Okay, sorry, second rant for the day.