Buying A House: C or D?

now where is the Breaking a Lease: C or D? thread...

kinder, I moved 5 years ago out of a big city where I could walk to everything and had so much more options to a tiny village a car ride from anything (including a shop but not a pub - I wanted one or the other so I could at least see another human face if I felt the need to - for many of the same reasons you're taking about; outside space, change of lifestyle. Love it and don't regret a minute of it.

In the interest of balance, the kids were old enough that they were at university for the majority of the period and they hate how quiet and remote it is (but then neither of them drive and want to do actual Young People's Things in the evening or at weekends).

xp oh weird, I used to live in Flagstaff 20 years ago and spent a lot of time driving around Sedona / Oak Creek Canyon / Jerome. I have really fond memories of that area, and some less fond ones of a really fucking weird party I ended up at in a trailer park in Cornville.

Housing costs in Flag seemed crazy high back then, I have no idea what they would be like now.

They are ridiculous now! I have friends who moved up there from here and I could not believe how high rents are.
Cornville is creepy, lots of meth heads and other weirdos. Cottonwood has a lot of that too, unfortunately. My new neighborhood seems relatively nice. Well-maintained homes and yards. My lot backs up to state land which was a major draw.

thanks tracer - primary schools in current place are fine, but secondary schools are a bit all over the place, so we'd end up moving in like 6 years time anyway (which would disrupt younger one's primary schooling) but I have in the back of my mind that I'd be in my 40s then so my life will be over anyway (joeks)

aldo I think you moved from where I am now. It's not so much a change of lifestyle I want for myself but for the kids I guess. It's the same distance from the city as one of the suburbs (teen kids would be able to get around easily) so it's more a psychological "aghh village life" thing I think.

sufjan despite living in what I consider a decent sized house all the storage is full up except for a drawer in a cabinet which I am excitedly trying to work out what could go in and free up space elsewhere. I am constantly thinking about chucking stuff out (mainly baby stuff tbh, why does everything to do with babies have to be so bulky?) in a kind of one-in-one-out mindset but I'd like to not think about it. It stops me from hoarding stuff though; I have a real dislike of the thought of something undeserved taking up space in my house.

io <3 for the diagrams; I sort of do that too

lol we have a baby swing in our living room right now, and I can't even access my records because of it. We also can't eat together at our kitchen table because there's a bouncer between one of the chairs and a wall.

I'm going to throw a party the day I get rid of the sodding Jumperoo
and the playpen stashed under the bed that I stub my toe on every other day
and the car seats

i want to get rid of my records AND the baby gear tbh

we have the biggest place we've ever had - 5 bedrooms - but i want these spaces to be functional and not storage

this dream house has a garage PLUS parking for at least 3 more cars in the drive so I'd be free to fill up the garage with ladders of various sizes, nearly empty tins of paint and boxes, nay CRATES, of cables. Maybe some bottles of fizzy water. This is what every girl wants deep down.

so I've been looking for an excuse to buy an outdoor camera, mostly to play around with before giving it to my dad as a gift -- they have a back yard where all kinds of wildlife hang out, and he'd love to see when animals dropped by when he wasn't there

I asked the roofers nicely if they'd mind if I put one on my garage while they were there, assuring them I'm just peeking at progress and not spying. so, of course I'm checking every few minutes and getting all excited

when I dropped by over lunch it looked like a missile had hit the front of my roof

i wish i could buy this house in my town. someone here should. i want to live in the 2 room studio. maria and the kids can have the house.

https://www.trulia.com/p/ma/greenfield/128-mountain-rd-greenfield-ma-01301--2000388499

that place is awesome! i def want to live on a Mountain Road somewhere at some point in my life.

damn western MA had gotten pricey! greenfield was supposed to be the cheaper alternative to northampton & amherst

ok never mind that place is luxurious

it sold for 150K in 2014

It sounds like a lot of work was done to it after that sale, though. And it's still staggeringly cheap by L.A. standards.

Also, I'm now getting Greenfield, MA real estate ads on facebook.

that's high for greenfield. but it does look like they put a lot of work into it. who knows if they get that price. still lots of bargains in town.

obit for the architect:

http://willistonblogs.com/obituaries/2014/11/17/john-paul-rutherford-falconer-43/

Rudd was a Navy guy, serving on destroyers in the Pacific at the end of World War ll. He attended Brown and Cornell Universities to get his degrees in engineering and architecture; sailed small boats for Cornell’s team; met and married “Dibby” Derby;

His marriage to Dibby ended, he got rid of his worldly “stuff” and bought Lotus, an old 32 ft. wooden sailboat and called it home.

that's a hell of an obit

for instance, this house would be scooped up so fast if it wasn't in greenfield. it's been for sale forever. so friggin' nice. 8 acres! but people here are looking for cheaper houses. the house across the street from me was priced to sell and it sold in a week just last month.

https://www.trulia.com/p/ma/greenfield/27-george-st-greenfield-ma-01301--2000390706

it was actually a sweet deal across the street from me. there is an apartment upstairs that you can rent for $1000 or more and there's your mortgage! people love buying stuff like that around here. and its in great shape.

https://www.movoto.com/greenfield-ma/68-pierce-st-greenfield-ma-01301-300_72286458/

failing to buy a house atm, just had another offer 10k over the asking price rejected, it is the worst market, i despair

the problem with the drive to build new houses is that every modern property we've seen on the market is horrible and usually tiny

we have two people coming to look at our house today. it would be nice to get an offer even at asking :)

And shockingly badly built. Our (rental) place was built four years ago and it’s falling to pieces. We’ve had electrics fail, sewers back up and whoever designed this house managed to fail at designing a block that could avoid getting hit by trucks. Seriously, the way he balconies hang out towards the alley means that out neighbour’s balcony has been hit by trucks on at least 4 occasions.

We’re looking at joining a property collective. Essentially a group of like minded people who buy a block and subdivide it into townhouses, but everyone gets a say in how it is speccced and built. We’re doing a co design workshop tomorrow, but it’s a pretty long process 3 years from signing up tthe getting a house.

best of luck

if all goes according to plan I'll arrive home tonight to find a dumpster in my driveway and part of my siding torn off. phase 2 of the wallet-draining has begun!

xpost Kind of like a commune? Oh I guess communes share in more day to day responsibility and space. I have been thinking about visiting Twin Orange in Georgia to see how much on the granola spectrum they are.

we've seen the perfect 'forever' house - need to move fairly soon for schools etc. exactly what we want, in budget. But it's on a main road on one side (fields out the back though) so level of traffic noise is possibly more than I could tolerate. potential to put more soundproofing measures in but that's quite a gamble. really torn!

kinder, I live on a major street with four lanes of 30-mph traffic (roughly 37 gills per parsec, for the eurodweebs) and it's fine.

Pros: Giving directions is easy. Pretty much everything we need is right nearby (walk to multiple grocery stores, restaurants, public transit).

Con: There is traffic noise but we got used to it very quickly, and now don't really even hear it; it's like living by the sea. Indeed, nowadays if we vacation someplace quieter it's kind of eerie and unsettling!

We do have a lot of trees and hedges for privacy and noise/exhaust blockage, and I intend to plant some more to give us the full secret-garden look as years go by.

If it's the right house for you it's the right house for you.

it depends how busy a road it is. I'm not a great worrier but I don't find the raft of studies linking the air pollution you get from living on main roads with various illnesses all that hard to believe. more conclusively, on our way to our last viewing we saw a dead cat with its guts spread over the tarmac and that's decided the matter for now

aw, don't jump to conclusions, coulda just been a perfectly ordinary satanic ritual

the end of my street that has the most small children is also the end that previously had a guy who loved to really gun the engine after leaving his driveway. great combo when kids are constantly running around the street because it's the sleepy end of a block

I've said it before, I live about 650 ft (200m) away from I-40. Like Puffin, I compare it to living by the sea too.

My only concern would be about ever wanting to turn left out of your driveway.

For us, if the traffic is too vigorous for a left turn (generally only at morning rush) we just go right, then go around the block or make a u-turn.

The streets are arranged so that we have choices; one can go left, right, right-right-right-left, left-left-left-right, or right-U. Or we can say fuck it and walk, or say fuck it and take public transit.

IIRC, that's how you get the Fatality effects on Mortal Kombat IX.

first ppl today loved the house but it was too small for them. second ppl coming at 3:30. plz wish me luck.

good luck!

I just had that terrible time yesterday of getting a lot of rain and then the basement is all wet
which made me long for apartment days

I spent hours shop-vac'ing water out of my basement yesterday too. Amazingly nothing got damaged aside from a bunch of CDs that I'd stupidly left in a box on the floor. Won't be reading the lyrics/liner notes on a bunch of my V through Y artists anymore.

I live on a main boulevard of my city with two lanes of traffic, then a divide with an elevated metro line, then two more lanes of traffic. But the windows installed here are incredible, they block almost all that noise so that the trains rolling by every couple minutes are just a rumble like distant thunder, and the cars are silent. Ambulances and police cars are a bit more but really I’m amazed, outside or with the windows open it’s quite loud.

it's really annoying, our current place and previous place are both on no-through-roads in the city centre, but amazingly quiet. distant traffic noise, sure, but it feels distant iyswim. car alarms, police helicopters occasionally.
yet moving to a countryside-ish village seems to entail living on an A-road!

I'm mainly scared of being woken up at 6am by huge rumbling trucks or double decker buses. and yeah the pollution although we would spend minimal time on that side of the property (hopefully can find a back way to schools etc)

the golden rule of basement - if you care about it, put it in a rubbermaid bin

ha i've been burned by basements before so my rule is - if mold can grow on it and/or if you don't want it to smell, don't put it down there.

we had 48 hours of heavy rain earlier this week though and it was nice to see that everything was dry down there

Yep I have a basement music studio with approximately a brugjillion farthings' worth of instruments and recording gear in it. No space for these things anywhere else, unfortunately.

We had some wetness down there a few weeks ago and I hoped it would go away on its own; it didn't. We were about to go out of town and I was setting out fans and shop-vacing like mad. Eventually I figured out it wasn't coming through the foundation - just a leaking water heater. Vastly easier to fix. Happy ending.

Joys of homeownership, eh?

lately instead of being terrified of owning a 110-year-old house I have been relieved - if it's still intact like it is after that long it'll probably be ok under my tenure

When I looked at my place with the realtor (exactly one year ago last Saturday) it had been raining for a week straight and the basement was totally dry which I took as a great sign. Some water showed up on the floor this fall and I panicked until I realized it was the kitchen sink drain leaking above it which is so much better than a crack in the foundation.

As for noise I live on a fairly busy but mostly quiet street, but the downside is that it's in the middle of hundreds of student houses. None within three or four blocks due to rules that limit the number of non-relatives who live together, but on weekend nights there are plenty of loud drunken people staggering through while party hopping late at night singing or yelling or getting in fights or whatever, and on home football saturdays there are suddenly thousands of people walking around en route to the stadium. Which isn't necessarily horrible, but just really took me by surprise the first I went out to walk the dog and there were a dozens of wasted college kids roaming around at 10am on a Saturday.

lately instead of being terrified of owning a 110-year-old house I have been relieved - if it's still intact like it is after that long it'll probably be ok under my tenure

This is similar to how I used to feel about the United States of America.

You never know how damp basements get until you use a dehumidifier. Our old basement was only maybe 700 sq ft and on some days we would need to empty out a liter of water every day.