when Wright is all wrong
This house will from now on be referred to as Wright. Since that's the street it's on. I'm pretty clever, I know. My husband totally loved this house, and I really liked it, except that the location was all wrong.
I need to back up. When we started our house hunt, we were looking in a lot of different cities. One of them was the town this house is in. It's not a place I wanted to live, and it took me a long time to realize that and even longer to admit that, so there was a good deal of arguing about this house. It has the same basic layout as the house we ended up buying, and this house was 40k cheaper. I can't remember all the details but it really was similar to what we ended up in, although Wright has a solarium on the back of the house. The kitchen was layed out oddly, it opened into the dining room right in the middle of the kitchen, making for an awkward split. There was hardly any counter space because of it. Aside from the kitchen, I really liked the house, but something didn't quite feel right. It had a really nice family room downstairs, with a fireplace built into an entire wall of brick that looked great. There were 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and nice closets and enough space, but I couldn't figure out what was bugging me.
I did know that I wasn't very happy that it was literally within a block of a MAJOR, crazily busy expressway and the noise was all you could hear outside. Inside it wasn't an issue but I kept thinking, how annoying is it going to be when we're outside in the summer and all we can hear is traffic? Being so close to that expressway was actually wonderful for commuting, the major reason we were moving in the first place, but it just wasn't right. I had that feeling in my stomach that if we bought this house I'd regret it, and who wants to regret the biggest purchase (so far) of their life? We'd looked at a lot of houses by this point, and friends and family kept telling me "you'll know it when you find the right house". And I kept waiting for my gut to kick in and scream "This is it!! This is the house for you!!" But it didn't. Eventually I realized it was the closeness to the expressway, and after some research online and a few days/nights of driving around, it seemed that the city in general was kind of on a decline. Houses were going into foreclosure right and left, some parts of the city weren't at all nice, and it seemed the only decent neighborhoods left were in the few streets around Wright. I didn't want to live there, and eventually we decided that it was better if we just took it completely off of our list.
It was also around this time that we upped our price range by $25k, because we'd literally ruled out 98% of houses in our price range in cities we wanted to live in. We were starting to wonder if we'd ever find a house we both agreed on and loved and could afford!