Katsmeow
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2009
- Messages
- 5,308
What is more important to you: the house itself or its location?
I saw this question asked elsewhere and my first thought was house is most important. Then I realized we are probably going to eventually sell our current house due to location.
First, to be clear, I know that for most people it isn't 100% either/or. That is, even if one factor is more important, the other factor has to meet some minimal threshold. While location is really important to me, the house has to meet some minimum. It can't be a falling down shack. And, even if house was more important, I wouldn't want to live in an unsafe neighborhood with a lot of crime or whatever.
I also know that some things can't be easily characterized as house or location. They may have elements of both. Nords in his thread mentioned loving the views from his current house and enjoying the wildlife. Is that house or location?
In our case, we actually mostly love our actual physical house. It overall has a nice layout and I like how it looks. The master bath needs to be remodeled but everything I would want to do could be done at not huge cost. There is some other work that would take this house interior from being really really good to almost perfect. These are things that good feasibly be done.
And, we have a beautiful neighborhood. We live in an acreage subdivision. It is very quiet (gated) and every house is different. There is an HOA but very laid back with sensible restrictions that we don't mind (and I don't like HOAs). We can have all of our pets (the main reason we bought here). We have lovely gentle hills that are great for walking.
We have deer in subdivision and bunnies. I even saw a bald eagle one day. I love all of this. I consider all of those things to be primarily "house" even though it could be argued that the beauty of the subdivision and the wildlife are location.
So that makes it great. The only thing that really bothers me about the house is that without kids living here it is bigger than we need. We have unused rooms. So, I hate basically paying for maintaining a house that has space we don't need. And, I hate paying taxes for the value of a house when we don't use all the value.
Yet, I would probably tolerate that except for the location. I hate the location. We are about 18 minutes from the closest grocery store. About 5 minutes more than that to the closest grocery store I want to shop at. The nearest convenience store is 12 minutes away. In fact, it takes 5 minutes of driving to even get to the front of the subdivision. It is highly unlikely there will ever be any stores any closer to us.
And, the stores (other than grocery stores) that are within 20 minutes are mostly not stores I want to go to. The best of them is Target. The nicer stores are near a mall about 40 minutes away. And, we go shopping there. But, even that mall is relatively limited.
When we moved here, we were about 25 minutes (during good traffic) from a major shopping/amenities area in a very large city. Now, we are about an hour and 15 minutes away. So, we rarely go there unless it is urgent.
Nothing delivers to us in terms of stores (well, Pizza Hut delivers). We have no public transportation anywhere in this area. Right now, DH and I are fine with having to drive so far to everywhere. We are in good health and enjoy driving. But, what about when DH is 80 and I'm 73? Well we want to have to drive 45 minutes away 2 or 3 times a week (or alternatively circumscribe our life to places 25 minutes away and just not go to stores we want to go to)?
So, as much as I love the house itself and love the subdivision and the wildlife, I find myself resenting our far it is to go everywhere and the lack of choice we have for places to go within reasonable distance. While I don't really want to live right in the middle of the city, I would like to live within 10 minutes of a grocery store and have more options for deliveries and transportation. And, make major shopping no more than 20 or 25 minutes away.
So, I think in the end for us location will probably trump house. The question is when to have that occur. On the one hand, we could wait until we had to move. Wait until driving these places is really onerous and just stay where we are. That would be staying here for another 10 or 15 years.
The other possibility is to move in 2 or 3 years. Right now, we need to be where we are because of our dogs. But, our dogs are aging and won't be with us all that many years longer. Our cats can go with us of course.
The argument to move sooner is that even though we can drive now and it isn't onerous it would sure be nice to not have to drive so much and to have more amenities closer to us. And, if we moved we could buy a smaller house and not pay for what we don't use. That said, there is I think not much chance we could find a house as nice as this one in terms of layout and amenities within our budget. And, even if we did it certainly wouldn't be in as beautiful a neighborhood and we would give up the wildlife. Of course, the wildlife and being closer to amenities are opposing consideration. That is, any place that is closer to stores, etc. isn't going to have deer in the front yard by and large....
But, then it comes back to location v. house. Yes, house here is no doubt better than any house we would buy. Any house we would buy with a location we would like would be more expensive per square foot most likely due to being closer in. So, the better location definitely requires a compromise on house. And, I think we make that tradeoff but it is hard to decide for sure.
Anyway, for you, house or location?
I saw this question asked elsewhere and my first thought was house is most important. Then I realized we are probably going to eventually sell our current house due to location.
First, to be clear, I know that for most people it isn't 100% either/or. That is, even if one factor is more important, the other factor has to meet some minimal threshold. While location is really important to me, the house has to meet some minimum. It can't be a falling down shack. And, even if house was more important, I wouldn't want to live in an unsafe neighborhood with a lot of crime or whatever.
I also know that some things can't be easily characterized as house or location. They may have elements of both. Nords in his thread mentioned loving the views from his current house and enjoying the wildlife. Is that house or location?
In our case, we actually mostly love our actual physical house. It overall has a nice layout and I like how it looks. The master bath needs to be remodeled but everything I would want to do could be done at not huge cost. There is some other work that would take this house interior from being really really good to almost perfect. These are things that good feasibly be done.
And, we have a beautiful neighborhood. We live in an acreage subdivision. It is very quiet (gated) and every house is different. There is an HOA but very laid back with sensible restrictions that we don't mind (and I don't like HOAs). We can have all of our pets (the main reason we bought here). We have lovely gentle hills that are great for walking.
We have deer in subdivision and bunnies. I even saw a bald eagle one day. I love all of this. I consider all of those things to be primarily "house" even though it could be argued that the beauty of the subdivision and the wildlife are location.
So that makes it great. The only thing that really bothers me about the house is that without kids living here it is bigger than we need. We have unused rooms. So, I hate basically paying for maintaining a house that has space we don't need. And, I hate paying taxes for the value of a house when we don't use all the value.
Yet, I would probably tolerate that except for the location. I hate the location. We are about 18 minutes from the closest grocery store. About 5 minutes more than that to the closest grocery store I want to shop at. The nearest convenience store is 12 minutes away. In fact, it takes 5 minutes of driving to even get to the front of the subdivision. It is highly unlikely there will ever be any stores any closer to us.
And, the stores (other than grocery stores) that are within 20 minutes are mostly not stores I want to go to. The best of them is Target. The nicer stores are near a mall about 40 minutes away. And, we go shopping there. But, even that mall is relatively limited.
When we moved here, we were about 25 minutes (during good traffic) from a major shopping/amenities area in a very large city. Now, we are about an hour and 15 minutes away. So, we rarely go there unless it is urgent.
Nothing delivers to us in terms of stores (well, Pizza Hut delivers). We have no public transportation anywhere in this area. Right now, DH and I are fine with having to drive so far to everywhere. We are in good health and enjoy driving. But, what about when DH is 80 and I'm 73? Well we want to have to drive 45 minutes away 2 or 3 times a week (or alternatively circumscribe our life to places 25 minutes away and just not go to stores we want to go to)?
So, as much as I love the house itself and love the subdivision and the wildlife, I find myself resenting our far it is to go everywhere and the lack of choice we have for places to go within reasonable distance. While I don't really want to live right in the middle of the city, I would like to live within 10 minutes of a grocery store and have more options for deliveries and transportation. And, make major shopping no more than 20 or 25 minutes away.
So, I think in the end for us location will probably trump house. The question is when to have that occur. On the one hand, we could wait until we had to move. Wait until driving these places is really onerous and just stay where we are. That would be staying here for another 10 or 15 years.
The other possibility is to move in 2 or 3 years. Right now, we need to be where we are because of our dogs. But, our dogs are aging and won't be with us all that many years longer. Our cats can go with us of course.
The argument to move sooner is that even though we can drive now and it isn't onerous it would sure be nice to not have to drive so much and to have more amenities closer to us. And, if we moved we could buy a smaller house and not pay for what we don't use. That said, there is I think not much chance we could find a house as nice as this one in terms of layout and amenities within our budget. And, even if we did it certainly wouldn't be in as beautiful a neighborhood and we would give up the wildlife. Of course, the wildlife and being closer to amenities are opposing consideration. That is, any place that is closer to stores, etc. isn't going to have deer in the front yard by and large....
But, then it comes back to location v. house. Yes, house here is no doubt better than any house we would buy. Any house we would buy with a location we would like would be more expensive per square foot most likely due to being closer in. So, the better location definitely requires a compromise on house. And, I think we make that tradeoff but it is hard to decide for sure.
Anyway, for you, house or location?