Geoff and I put in an offer on a house Wednesday, and it was accepted. Yay! The house is near 7th and Washington- a nice, quiet little section south of downtown. The new house meets most of the qualifications we were looking for:
Walking
I photoshopped a few variations on painting schemes.
The walk to work will be a tiny bit farther than it is now (about 5 min more) but will be more varied, with lots of different routes to take. Also within walking distance is a grocery store, lots of places to eat, and coffee shops. The walk score of the house is a little lower than my last place at 57- mostly because it is completely blocked off in one direction by train tracks. But that also means it’s a quieter, less busy neighborhood, with less through traffic.
The “walk score” rating is a tricky thing. While my new house may not rate quite as high on the walk score site, I will be able to go weeks without driving- everything I need is within walking distance. This was one of my bigger goals in getting a new house. Our old location at 28th and T was mostly OK for walking, but the Alps grocery store, quite frankly, scared me (we have gone there several time to find all their milk expired). Plus, walking down 27th street just isn’t that pleasant.
Decent size yard/space from neighbors
We looked at a few houses that were great except they had tiny yards, which left no space for a garage, gardening, or any of the other things we’d like to plan for outside. The new place has a standard downtown lot size- 50×142, and the house site a decent distance away from the neighbors.
We are going to get rid of as much as this wall as possible to open up these 2 rooms.
Finished basement
we really wanted a finished basement, or, failing that, a non-scary, non-leaking basement. This, as it turns out, is fairly difficult to find downtown (basically, someone needs to have put in new basement walls at some point). The new house has a fully finished, very livable basement with some newer walls, a newer floor, and an egress window. So our bedroom will go in the basement, where we will be cooler in the summer and less affected by neighborhood noise.
Extra garage space
We wanted a two car garage- not so we could put both cars in the garage, but so I could have a woodworking shop permanently set up. The new house has a very deep one car garage, so it fits the bill. We’ve talked a bit about adding a two car garage off the alley, but we’re not sure yet.
Price
The house came in at more than $40,000 less than the top of our price range- which makes me very happy. We increased our buying range from $140,000 to $150,000 and then to $160,000 at the very top. We increased the price range because we just weren’t finding anything that met our specifications, but I am much more comfortable in the $110,000 range. If one of us were to lose our job, we could still make our utility and mortgage payments on one salary.
The rooms are a little small. We are having the wall on the right taken out, which should help.
The compromise: size
The house that started this all was quite large. And Geoff and I both really liked the idea of having a house with TONS of room, and really high ceilings, and oh, did I mention lots of room? Going back to that first post on “the dream house” these were my reasons for wanting the extra room: bigger art room, more garage space, and the ability to put litterboxes far away from living areas. The new house accomplishes a few of these things, but the litterbox problem will still exist. We’re working on solutions to that: building an outdoor cat run so the cats can go outside on nice days, and venting rooms where litterboxes will be outside to mitigate odors. (If anyone has any other ideas, please let me know!)
A view of the back of the house. Note the door that leads onto the roof on the 2nd floor.
My art room will be in the “master bedroom’ on the 2nd floor. There is more room than my old artroom, and a walk in closet to store stuff. There’s also, strangely enough, a door out onto the roof. We plan to build a balcony out there.There’s no water upstairs, but I would like to get a water recycling sink anyway.
There’s another bedroom on the second floor that we will use as a guest bedroom- it’ll be nice to have a place for guests to stay besides the living room.
There are advantages to a smaller house: we’ll be less likely to keep accumulating stuff (especially since there is less storage in the new place), energy bills will be lower, and there’s less to clean and maintain. I want to integrate more green features into the house like water collection and maybe solar panels, and that too will be easier on a smaller scale. I’ll have more posts about my plans for green additions later on.
I’m quite excited about our new house, now we just need to get our old house ready to sell. Hoping it sells quick!
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I would like to put the computers themselves in a nearby closet- which I think will work out pretty well- we even ran the cable into the closet instead of the room anticipating this (we’ll also need to add a grounded outlet in there.)
