Dither, dither...
Sep. 18th, 2005 10:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jducoeurAs previously mentioned, we brought Susana on board as a buyer's agent a few weeks ago. Since then, she's been seriously earning her keep, pointing us at potentially interesting houses and generally kicking the moving project into high gear.
Well, one of the listings caught my eye as sounding particularly attractive. On Friday, I went to look at it, and was surprised to find that I liked it even more in person. So we went back again tonight with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
msmemory so she could take a look, and we continue to be quite attracted to it. A smidgeon expensive, but it has everything we wanted and a couple that hadn't occurred to us to look for. (Like an acre of land, most of it forested wetland, so it isn't adding to the price but provides lots of privacy.) The house just feels really nice. Walking into it is like shrugging on a well-tailored overcoat: from the kitchen to the family room to the basement, it fits us well.
It does, of course, have one snag: it's out in Framingham. We'd talked about location before, and established that anything out to about Framingham or Chelmsford was okay if the house was perfect. Well, okay -- now we've found a near-perfect house, so we need to decide if we're serious about that.
It's an odd psychological barrier, crossing 128. Framingham really isn't all that far -- maybe 15 minutes further out from the city -- but we've heard so many people talk about how far they think of it being that it gives us pause. One of the objectives for this house is to have a good place to start entertaining again (it's delightfully well-laid-out for parties), and there's an odd little fear that no one will make the trek out there.
Of course, it isn't very rational. Everywhere is far from somewhere -- this location is considerably closer to Waltham than, say, Dorchester is, and people go there all the time. Some of it is probably just habit: I've lived in Waltham for over half my life, andmsmemory nearly as long, so the idea of moving a significant distance away and having to learn the ins and outs of a new area is curiously daunting. Up until now, the house-buying process has been very intellectual, but now that push is coming to shove, we're learning a bit about ourselves.
We'll see. First we need to decide if we want it. Even if we do, a host of things could go wrong. But one way or another, this project has now taken on a dimension of reality that it didn't have before...
Well, one of the listings caught my eye as sounding particularly attractive. On Friday, I went to look at it, and was surprised to find that I liked it even more in person. So we went back again tonight with
msmemory so she could take a look, and we continue to be quite attracted to it. A smidgeon expensive, but it has everything we wanted and a couple that hadn't occurred to us to look for. (Like an acre of land, most of it forested wetland, so it isn't adding to the price but provides lots of privacy.) The house just feels really nice. Walking into it is like shrugging on a well-tailored overcoat: from the kitchen to the family room to the basement, it fits us well.It does, of course, have one snag: it's out in Framingham. We'd talked about location before, and established that anything out to about Framingham or Chelmsford was okay if the house was perfect. Well, okay -- now we've found a near-perfect house, so we need to decide if we're serious about that.
It's an odd psychological barrier, crossing 128. Framingham really isn't all that far -- maybe 15 minutes further out from the city -- but we've heard so many people talk about how far they think of it being that it gives us pause. One of the objectives for this house is to have a good place to start entertaining again (it's delightfully well-laid-out for parties), and there's an odd little fear that no one will make the trek out there.
Of course, it isn't very rational. Everywhere is far from somewhere -- this location is considerably closer to Waltham than, say, Dorchester is, and people go there all the time. Some of it is probably just habit: I've lived in Waltham for over half my life, and
msmemory nearly as long, so the idea of moving a significant distance away and having to learn the ins and outs of a new area is curiously daunting. Up until now, the house-buying process has been very intellectual, but now that push is coming to shove, we're learning a bit about ourselves.We'll see. First we need to decide if we want it. Even if we do, a host of things could go wrong. But one way or another, this project has now taken on a dimension of reality that it didn't have before...
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 04:36 am (UTC)People will come out to you, at least for a while, but would there be a chance of you no longer coming in to people? You might think "no, of course not", but once you've settled in for a few years... I know I blow off a lot of stuff that I wouldn't if I weren't out in Waltham, and that's "close" by many people's standards.
Snow. How hard is it going to be in the winter?
Construction. Are you going to be screwed if Major Road going to your area goes down for the summer, or are there alternatives?
People without cars are going to have to go through a lot more maneuvering to get to you. It doesn't look like T passes work on the buses from the train either, which means someone taking the train and the bus both in and out is going to be blowing close to ten bucks on the trip. If it were me, and I were still at Simmons, there would be absolutely no way I'd have done it. Others may feel differently.
All that being said, what you really have to consider is if the house fills your needs. The rest of the tradeoffs are details.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-19 12:59 pm (UTC)Well, we *are* slowing down a smidgeon to begin with, and that's a consideration unto itself. Actually, that's one of the attractions of the house -- it looks more comfortable for us to *live* in than anything else we've seen.
That said, we've never really been ones to let location prevent us from doing anything, and that seems unlikely to change. The actual time to get into the city isn't much greater except for rush hour, and in practice we do most of our going-to-stuff from work, so that doesn't change at all. So I think it's unlikely to change how much we do, although it might tweak exactly *what* we do. It probably has significantly less impact than getting jobs in other towns would.
Snow. How hard is it going to be in the winter?
Worse, certainly. The house is on a fairly small and backish road. OTOH, it's on a small but important road with a lot of *much* more expensive houses on it, so I suspect there is a lot of motivation for the town to do good snow removal. We need to ask some of the current Framingham residents, but my suspicion is that, in practice, it's not dramatically worse.
Are you going to be screwed if Major Road going to your area goes down for the summer, or are there alternatives?
Well, they're not going to close Route 90. And actually, there are a *lot* of ways to get within a couple of miles of the house: 90, 9, 20 and 30 all run pretty close. So one road going down might inconvenience us, but it doesn't trap us.