safe as houses
Mar. 17th, 2021 07:24 amLast Sunday ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shalmestere and I walked the dogs in the park, and on the way home we spotted a realtor's "Open House" sign, on a house we had previously noticed for sale. So on a whim, we went in to look around. Or rather, I sat on the front lawn with the dogs while shalmestere went in to look around, then she came out and we swapped roles.
The most obvious facts about the house: it's brick (ours is frame with aluminum siding), it's on a larger and busier street than ours, and on the other side of that street is the one-square-mile Forest Park (which, as D. points out, means "the view out front will never change with development"). Like ours, it has a detached garage in back -- single-car rather than two-car, but there's a driveway where a car could park without blocking the sidewalk. (And the street is busy enough that nobody's going to park blocking the driveway.)
The front yard is about the same size as ours, but fenced. The back yard is slightly larger than ours, and mostly grass rather than concrete, with a large tree (maple, I think; it would presumably need regular professional trimming to keep things from falling on the house). The tree overhanging the south side of the house presumably means a rooftop solar panel wouldn't make sense, unless it were on the garage.
The kitchen is about the same size as ours, but more practically laid out: we currently have a bunch of square footage, but we seldom need to dance in the kitchen. (Although I have used the kitchen floor to cut out panels of tent fabric....) The living and dining rooms are somewhat more distinct from one another than in our house. Where we have an enclosed porch separated from the living room by a formerly-exterior wall, the house in question has a small sun-room adjacent to the living room (it faces north towards the park, so not all that sunny, but it has a west-facing window too). Come to think of it, almost every room follows the design principle of "light on two sides", unlike our current house in which even the rooms with two or three exterior walls have windows in only one of them (presumably because other houses are six feet away on either side).
There's a half bathroom on the ground floor, one of the obvious shortfalls of our current house (at least if you have visitors, which we expect to have again someday). On the second floor are a full bathroom and three bedrooms: a master bedroom about the same size as ours with decent closet space, a smaller bedroom with decent closet space, and a still smaller one with no closet space that struck both of us as a good office.
Most of the basement is finished as a "family room", with a semi-built-in workbench in one corner. The stairway down to the basement leads into the middle of the basement, rather than one end, which I guess makes it less of a gauntlet. One unfinished end of the basement is boiler-and-laundry, while the other unfinished end is storage and an oil tank (which means the oil pipes have to run across the ceiling of the finished section to feed the boiler). I've never lived with oil heat before, so I don't know what that implies.
All in all, it has a lot of practical or aesthetic advantages over our current house. It costs half again as much, but we could afford that at present. The big problems, of course, are that our current house isn't even on the market, much less sold, and it would be a big hassle to prepare it for market, sell it, and move two blocks away.
shalmestere and I walked the dogs in the park, and on the way home we spotted a realtor's "Open House" sign, on a house we had previously noticed for sale. So on a whim, we went in to look around. Or rather, I sat on the front lawn with the dogs while shalmestere went in to look around, then she came out and we swapped roles.The most obvious facts about the house: it's brick (ours is frame with aluminum siding), it's on a larger and busier street than ours, and on the other side of that street is the one-square-mile Forest Park (which, as D. points out, means "the view out front will never change with development"). Like ours, it has a detached garage in back -- single-car rather than two-car, but there's a driveway where a car could park without blocking the sidewalk. (And the street is busy enough that nobody's going to park blocking the driveway.)
The front yard is about the same size as ours, but fenced. The back yard is slightly larger than ours, and mostly grass rather than concrete, with a large tree (maple, I think; it would presumably need regular professional trimming to keep things from falling on the house). The tree overhanging the south side of the house presumably means a rooftop solar panel wouldn't make sense, unless it were on the garage.
The kitchen is about the same size as ours, but more practically laid out: we currently have a bunch of square footage, but we seldom need to dance in the kitchen. (Although I have used the kitchen floor to cut out panels of tent fabric....) The living and dining rooms are somewhat more distinct from one another than in our house. Where we have an enclosed porch separated from the living room by a formerly-exterior wall, the house in question has a small sun-room adjacent to the living room (it faces north towards the park, so not all that sunny, but it has a west-facing window too). Come to think of it, almost every room follows the design principle of "light on two sides", unlike our current house in which even the rooms with two or three exterior walls have windows in only one of them (presumably because other houses are six feet away on either side).
There's a half bathroom on the ground floor, one of the obvious shortfalls of our current house (at least if you have visitors, which we expect to have again someday). On the second floor are a full bathroom and three bedrooms: a master bedroom about the same size as ours with decent closet space, a smaller bedroom with decent closet space, and a still smaller one with no closet space that struck both of us as a good office.
Most of the basement is finished as a "family room", with a semi-built-in workbench in one corner. The stairway down to the basement leads into the middle of the basement, rather than one end, which I guess makes it less of a gauntlet. One unfinished end of the basement is boiler-and-laundry, while the other unfinished end is storage and an oil tank (which means the oil pipes have to run across the ceiling of the finished section to feed the boiler). I've never lived with oil heat before, so I don't know what that implies.
All in all, it has a lot of practical or aesthetic advantages over our current house. It costs half again as much, but we could afford that at present. The big problems, of course, are that our current house isn't even on the market, much less sold, and it would be a big hassle to prepare it for market, sell it, and move two blocks away.
