Dither, dither...

[jducoeur]

As 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 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...

Comments

[jducoeur]

Alastair and Myfanwy were very disappointed that people were so reluctant to come out when they entertained, and they lived in Framingham.

Yeah, but their bigger problem was that they weren't as personally close to nearly as many people, so they're not a good data point. The personal connections are crucial when it comes to parties. As new_man was saying, these things are reciprocal -- people are more likely to come to your parties if and only if you come to theirs.

where is the Barony holding events these days?

That's something we've been thinking about. I think it's better than it used to be in that regard -- I believe more events have been drifting out into these parts than there used to be. But obviously it wouldn't be a viable location for a post-revel to an in-town event.

How big a priority is entertaining, anyways?

Weeeel, that's an interesting question. At the gut level, very important -- it's the single thing we've most been missing in the past few years. (Our current house is *way* too crowded to entertain well, its state of disrepair entirely aside.) Rationally, it's probably something we want to do well but occasionally.

A more interesting question is whether we invite people over for random gaming and stuff sometimes -- small-scale entertaining rather than larger. (We've already decided that we would probably turn the front parlour into a gaming/meeting room.) That's likely to be more often desireable, and the distance has more of an impact on it. It's those interactions with the community that we need to assess, and understand better how the move would affect them in practice...