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

Think about the good parts

[metageek.livejournal.com]

Think about the good parts. What can you get in Framingham that you can't closer in? Space, obviously. Quiet, probably. What else?

One thing we love about Chelmsford is that we're walking distance from a forest (state park) with hiking trails.

Didn't you mention you'd gone to a great movie+dinner theatre in Framingham? (You posted about it at the time, but I can't find it now.)

Re: Think about the good parts

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

We get privacy (I won't be able to tell if my next door neighbor is working at her computer). Wildlife (abuts wetland area). Hiking trails nearby, in a state park and I believe by tacit agreement on the Boy Scout reservation when it's not full of Scouts.

The movie+dinner place is the Premium Cinema at the AMC movie house on Flutie Pass, which runs between the Natick Mall and the Framingham Mall. They tend not to show a lot of SF/adventure movies, more thrillers and art films, but they have the comfiest seats I've ever found in a movie house.

Re: Think about the good parts

[cvirtue.livejournal.com]

Privay is such a wonderful thing. Our back yard is semi-private; privacy fence (ours) on one side, elderly friendly neighbor on the other side. If she's not in her back yard, we could ... well, it's very private, let's just say that. And quiet. And actually dark at night. And I have twikle lights on the trees in the back. Barbequing. Think of all those things.

From what I've read today, I think you should try and buy it. Commit to your carless friends that you'll fetch them from the commuter rail when needed, or what-have-you, or you can meet them in town and go sushi-bar-hopping in mass transit territory regularly.

Re: Think about the good parts

[jducoeur]

While we probably wouldn't use the dinner theater very often (it's very expensive, and often not showing what we're looking for), having the main multiplex there would probably mean that we get out to a lot more movies in general. There are many restaurants in the area for date night, although we mostly know the boring chain restaurants -- we'd have to do some exploring to find the interesting ones. (Although the recommendations from jpicon are very useful there.) Shopping is generally pretty convenient.

This house isn't quite within walking distance of the state park, but it's within a very reasonable biking distance. One open question is whether the park has bike trails, which would be a definite plus. Even without that, the location is *much* better for biking than our current one.

As msmemory says, privacy is a big win -- we've never been entirely happy about having to worry about people peering in our windows. And frankly, it satisfies our desire for Trees: we both feel that a property is much prettier if it has a lot of trees on it, and this has more than we'd ever imagined. Being right next to (but about ten feet above) the wetland is really kind of neat. We expect that there's probably a lot more wildlife. (Not all of it the verdammt raccoons and squirrels that seem to be all that we have here.)