5/2 House Hunting: House 2

We came really close to talking ourselves into putting in an offer on this house. Or perhaps I should say, we had to talk ourselves out of putting in an offer on this house. I blame the beautiful weather, and the fact that the negatives are pretty much the negatives of our current house, so even though we pretty much hate those things about our current house, we know we can live with them.

House 2: $425,000 3 bed / 1.75 bath / 1,620 square feet / 7,620  square foot lot / 1 car carport

The Good:

On the same side of the freeway as where I work. The commute would take me up a portion of a really busy street, but not for long. And while it is not very far off that busy street, the neighborhood felt secluded and “away from it all”.

The entire yard- front and back –is fully fenced. There are portions where the fence would need to be higher, or we would need to plug up gaps at the bottom, but it could be made dog friendly pretty quickly. The giant deck off the dining room was great, and on a day like Saturday really expanded the public living spaces.

The living room had a great window seat and the kitchen had one of those deep window boxes. The flow from the living room into the dining room was very nice, and the light (at least this day) was great. The kitchen had nice gas stove.

The downstairs had been nicely redone and could just become a master retreat area.

The Bad:

Of the three official bedrooms, only one, the upstairs “master”, was big enough to hold our queen bed or Pop Tart’s bunk beds. We could have repurposed the office area downstairs into a master for us (and put Pop Tart in the upstairs master), but it would have made our bedroom the main way in and out of the house from the car.

There was a one car carport and easily space for a second carport to be put up over the driveway. However, the driveway was off something I hesitate to even call an alley in the back, and you would have to get out and open and close the back gate to get into the area. That is not too bad when there is more than one of you, but would suck a bit for my early morning drive to work by myself. It also meant that as is, there could be no dog door for the dogs, because you would never know if it was safe to open the gate to get into the yard or not.

The kitchen, while it had a gas stove and a 2 basin sink, was otherwise our current kitchen- a galley kitchen completely closed off from the rest of the house, except for a narrow doorway to the dining room.

Overall, the public spaces were small, and if we repurposed the office area in the basement to a master bedroom, there would have been no other family space, so once again, no “Kinnect” space.

The Verdict:

We seriously considered putting an offer in on this house. It was such a gorgeous day, and we liked the outside space so much, that it was really easy to overlook the problems with the interior space. And we have lived with the kitchen we hate for 10+ years, so it is easy to think we could keep on living with a similar kitchen. But we do not want to. We do not want to move into a new house knowing we hate something about it.