@ mskye: I admire you for doing Danvers to Natick for even just a month! My sister-in-law did North Andvoer to Natick every day for almost 2 years before they started a family and she left work. I have NO idea how she dealt with that. I commute on the Pike and don't mind that, but 128 drives me batty.
My parents house is assessed at $800,000. Thanks to gentrification, property taxes are fairly high (10k last year). If we bought it, we'd have to evict the current tenants or seriously go up on their rents to get a reasonable mortgage. Growing up, my parents used the top two floors as one unit, so it would be perfectly possible to raise a family in it. But, watching my dad deal with tenants , I'm not sure that's for us. Landlording, especially if you share the building, seems like a big PITA. It's been interesting and disheartening to have grown up in Somerville and seen how much has changed, especially the last 5 years or so. Many people think it's great, but the longtime residents have different views on the whole situation.
We are definitely saving money quickly. I was in grad school through May last year, and we decided to pay off my undergrad student loans right away so we paused house saving. We paid those off in February though so now we're really cooking on the down payment, tucking away at least $3,000 a month, most months more. If we're patient and actually wait till after a first baby ( which at the earliest would be July 2016) we'll definitely have a large down payment. Being patient is just hard! I'm also worried that even if we up the budget to $400,000, we're still going to lose out to people overbidding or throwing down all cash offers.