So my wife and I have been considering moving for various reasons. It would be a big change and it occurs to me that, unlike most people I know, I feel like I’ve been in one place most of my life. I’ve traveled halfway around the world and somehow ended up back in the city where I was born. My family moved when I was just four, and though I have very vivid, and happy, memories of the first house we lived in, moving wasn’t scary or traumatic. It was fun and exciting. Then I went off to college, which wasn’t exactly moving—just transferring some of my stuff—then got married and, well, settled down. My wife and I have lived in the same house for as long as we’ve been together. That’s because we’ve been happy with the place, and still are, mostly, but around us things are changing. We had neighbors who moved out and their house sat empty for a month or so, then one morning I went to work and when I came home in the afternoon there was a pile of brick and broken wood and glass and shingles where their house had been. It’s a scene that’s played out up and down our street: as houses get sold they get knocked down and are replaced with oversized McMansions. So, to paraphrase Billy Joel, if that’s movin’ up then we’re movin’ out.
We can’t just pick up and move, though, so we’ve been looking at some different houses, which has been fun. With every place I think, what would our lives be like here? I thought it would be easy but just one day of visiting various potential domiciles disabused me of that notion. At least one of the advantages of moving now is we can look at houses online without having to actually visit them which makes it easy to narrow the search, though several looked great on a screen but, when seen in person, looked like their photos had been retouched, airbrushed, and finally replaced with a picture of another house.
The first house was perfect and had everything we wanted—if it were knocked over on its side, since the design was tall and narrow. The hallway to the bedrooms wasn’t big enough for two people to pass. The bedrooms themselves were spacious, if, like Spider-Man, we could stick to the walls. At least there was a nice big yard to make up for the lack of interior space and the week-old-salmon-colored cabinets could always be repainted.
The next house was perfect and had everything we wanted and several things we didn’t, including a giant crater about fifty feet from the front door that looked like someone had started digging a spot for an Olympic-sized hot tub and then forgot about it. At least there was a nice big yard. The only problem was the road that ran right through the middle of it. On the other side of the road, in what would be the rest of our yard, there were several abandoned camper vans. My wife said that if we picked that place we’d make hauling those away a condition of closing the sale. I thought we could keep one. I’d turn it into a studio space and name it “Beethoven”, but we decided to pass on the place entirely.
The next house was perfect and had everything we wanted and then some. It had a nice big backyard with a shed and woods and a deck built around a tree with a couple of chairs for sitting. There was even a graveyard just a few doors down which I thought would be really convenient if it became the place where we spend the rest of our lives. Unfortunately the commute to work would be two hours every day and that’s at least an hour more than I want to spend driving.
The next house was perfect and had everything we wanted if we were looking for a staircase so steep it was like climbing into an M.C. Escher print. The amazing thing about it is from the outside it looked almost identical to the house of a friend of mine, even down to its position on a cul-de-sac, and, aside from the vertical stairs, had very similar floorplan. Years earlier he bought a car that matched ours, since he liked it so much, and it tickled me to think I could tell him we were moving into his house’s twin. It also had a nice big backyard, though the downside was it was all downside, the whole house overlooking a gully.
So we decided we’d continue searching, and a week later while I was at work my wife called to say she thought she’d found one that had everything we wanted, but we decided we’d look at it together to see what it didn’t.
Househunting has been our hobby off and on for a while. We were seriously thinking about downsizing but then the kids moved home. I just want a castle in the country on a river—is that too much to ask?
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Househunting can be fun and stressful. I remember when I decided I HAD to live near water to survive the first Trump administration. I became hopeless at ties, thinking I would never find what we wanted. We did after many, many months, and I couldn’t be happier. However, our neighbors could be better. Why don’t you all consider moving here? Quincy is a great place for dogs and there are ukulele players here.
ANN J KOPLOW recently posted…Day 4493: Becoming known