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Weekend, with houses
Mar. 2nd, 2008 09:02 pmBemo and I spent the weekend tootling around Lincoln, trying to get a better idea of its neighborhoods and looking at houses for sale; today was mostly popping in and out of a few open houses around the city. We're not planning to buy anytime soon - as if the year leaase we've only just started wasn't reason enough, we've got nothing really saved for a downpayment and Bemo is still working the part-time hours. In fact, we're really still in shock from the market being so different from DC, and may be overcompensating a bit in the other direction. (I'm sure the nice people we met today don't care much that their house would be worth quintuple the asking price in Virginia, but we felt compelled to tell them all anyway.)
We stopped in and saw an adorable bungalow going for 120K - the owners put in all of these cunningly well-done built-ins that made me drool. At last, somebody who understands the importance of good bookshelves. The price is a little on the high side of what we could potentialy afford, but the house was just a little darling and the heated, wired-for-tv-and-music garage/workshop made Bemo palpatate visibly.
The next house we looked at was 79K, and was a farmhouse built in 1900. Here is where my history bug gets me in trouble, because the bones of the house were so nice that I really wanted to rescue it from the horrible parquet floor and the bad linoleum tile laid everywhere, and the horrible bathrooms that needed to be gutted and begun over again. I would want to give it a loving, complete remodel and call one of my old curators in as a consultant in historic paint color and what to save and what to discard ruthlessly, and in short, get us all in way over our heads because truly? The place was a bit of a mess, and trying to see a house through the visible haze of cigarette smoke doesn't do much for its ambiance. Plus, it was on a busy street, and I don't want to have to deal with that.
The third house was an accident - it came up on the search Bemo did as being under 125K, which was wrong, wrong, wrong. It was a lovely, brand-new house with about triple the square footage we'd ever need, and was actually going for somewhere in the 300K's. Sterile neighborhood, though - most of the houses were up for sale and no trees to speak of. There are much cuter, older neighborhoods with houses we could actually afford where we will focus our search on. Although, as I said, we're at minimum a year and probably more realistically two years away from buying.
So we came home, and Bemo made his famous never-the-same-twice chilli, and now I am full and happy.
We stopped in and saw an adorable bungalow going for 120K - the owners put in all of these cunningly well-done built-ins that made me drool. At last, somebody who understands the importance of good bookshelves. The price is a little on the high side of what we could potentialy afford, but the house was just a little darling and the heated, wired-for-tv-and-music garage/workshop made Bemo palpatate visibly.
The next house we looked at was 79K, and was a farmhouse built in 1900. Here is where my history bug gets me in trouble, because the bones of the house were so nice that I really wanted to rescue it from the horrible parquet floor and the bad linoleum tile laid everywhere, and the horrible bathrooms that needed to be gutted and begun over again. I would want to give it a loving, complete remodel and call one of my old curators in as a consultant in historic paint color and what to save and what to discard ruthlessly, and in short, get us all in way over our heads because truly? The place was a bit of a mess, and trying to see a house through the visible haze of cigarette smoke doesn't do much for its ambiance. Plus, it was on a busy street, and I don't want to have to deal with that.
The third house was an accident - it came up on the search Bemo did as being under 125K, which was wrong, wrong, wrong. It was a lovely, brand-new house with about triple the square footage we'd ever need, and was actually going for somewhere in the 300K's. Sterile neighborhood, though - most of the houses were up for sale and no trees to speak of. There are much cuter, older neighborhoods with houses we could actually afford where we will focus our search on. Although, as I said, we're at minimum a year and probably more realistically two years away from buying.
So we came home, and Bemo made his famous never-the-same-twice chilli, and now I am full and happy.