Hello all.
My husband and I have been renters for the last ~15 years. We decided this past winter to move to a rural area a little ways away from where we live now. (Let's call it the Shire.) We wanted to buy and fix up an old house in the woods where our baby would grow up.
Then covid hit, and to make a long story short, the real estate market in the Shire became BONKERS. The houses we loved got snapped up.
So we have scaled down our ambitions. The plan is now to buy a small, cheap house in the Shire, move there to get our bearings, then maybe sell in 1-3 years when a more ideal house comes up.
(Yes, we've considered renting. But the rental market is also wacky, and we have a dog, which makes it difficult to find a good place even under normal circumstances. Plus we are tired of renting crummy places that we have no power to fix!)
We are most likely going to live in a suburban ranch house! I have never lived in the suburbs before or in a new (post-World War II) house before. It's not my normal taste, and to be honest, this is just not how I pictured things going after finally being ready to settle into a home of our own. But I am trying to stay positive and be grateful for the fact that we are easily able to buy a house at all when there is so much unemployment and chaos in the world.
Right now it seems like our choice is between two different ranch houses. Call them
Bag End and
Brandy Hall.
- Both cost about the same amount.
- Both have the same square footage.
- They are on opposite sides of the same general neighborhood.
Otherwise they have significant differences.
Brandy Hall has been recently renovated and has a trendier look to it. It appears to be move-in ready. We could unpack our stuff and start living. (With a baby and so much else going on in life, this is an appealing idea.) Awesome, landscaped backyard that looks magical. Has an extra bathroom. It's easy to visualize life there.
The downsides: to get to some of the fun amenities of this area (parks, etc.), we would have to drive for about 10 minutes. Also there is no garage, and some of the renovations look a little cheap to my eye.
By contrast,
Bag End looks slightly run down and would be more of a project. Past owners made some super-weird design decisions, some of which would be annoying to fix (along the lines of needing to move a staircase). There are odd little issues throughout the house that would irritate me every day until we fixed them.
We could make it our own, though, and with some improvements, the house could rise in value by the time we are ready to resell. It does have a garage. And best of all, it is SO CLOSE to all the parks and playgrounds! We could walk or bike quickly to a bunch of neat things. This nook of the neighborhood seems quieter and significantly better.
Which would you choose?
Decisions!