The New Hood

We're moving to a 30 year old neighborhood directly adjacent to our current neighborhood. When you say its name, most people, and I'm not excluding myself, may immediately have a house like this spring to mind.

Oh, dear.

Or this.

Ouch.

There are a few turkeys, but what there are more of, if you look closely, is treasures like this.

And this.

With lots up to 2+ acres, people can do a wide variety of things with their yards.

Now this is something you don't see every day. Actually, once I move, I WILL see it every day, because it's on my new street.


Look at this sweet house with its sweet mailbox! I am SO looking forward to having my own mailbox at the end of my driveway again!

Speaking of mailboxes, yes, the one that belongs to this house IS laying in the front yard.

Cue the music from 'Halloween'. (This house is apparently abandoned. It is not typical of the neighborhood! Stop looking at me like that!)

But really, folks, to me, even that is not as flat-out ghetto as what we currently have, which is this.

It's like living in some kind of compound. And of course our "mail box station" is on the busiest road in the neighborhood, and I really really enjoy jumping out of my car with the hazard lights on and dodging the evening traffic as I get my mail.

That speed limit of 30 is really just a suggestion to most of these people.

Today, packing some more, and arranging to have the new carpet installed upstairs. Imagine, if you will, 10 1/2 year old white carpet which has survived (and I use the term loosely) 3 kids, 2 cats, a dog, and me (I'm a klutz, I spilled a can of blue paint on it, which will never, never, never come out). You wouldn't buy a house with that carpet, would you? Me either.

Taking the Leap

We built this house in 2000 with such excitement, such high hopes. After having spent the previous 7 years in our "starter" home on a high-traffic street full of rental homes, we were thrilled to be moving into a sparkly, clean, giant home in a "real" neighborhood.


It never quite works out the way you expect, does it? We didn't move into a bad neighborhood, just an indifferent one. Over the years we began to long for more land and more country-like setting, but at the same time, we liked our general location and didn't want to have to move 30 minutes out of town to get those things. So we would look, and look, and look at new houses. Many that we looked at were $400,000+ homes. And it never felt quite right.

Don't get me wrong, we live in a nice neighborhood. We brought two children into the world in this house. We've been happy here. But something just didn't sit quite right.

It turned out that all this time, the answer was literally down the street from us, in a 30 year old neighborhood which some people might generously label "questionable". This blog will be the diary of our journey as we leave our McMansion for our unlikely dream home.