LJ Idol: Location, Location, Location

May 17, 2017 19:05

The first time I remember moving was the summer of 1991. We moved from Jacksonville, Florida to a very small town in the middle of Georgia that rarely shows up on any maps. I was seven years old. The real estate agent was taking us to visit potential houses and my parents were leaning towards a large, 3-bedroom ranch. I was running up and down the driveway when I noticed our neighbors across the street. I turned to my mother and asked, "Mom? Why are those people dressed like ghosts? It's not Halloween yet."

Those people were Klan members, doing yard work in Klan robes.

"Yes, your neighbors are Klan members," the real estate agent told us. "But look at the location of your home! It's in a beautiful neighborhood. You've got an acre of land. There's a grocery store and a gas station down the street. The elementary school is only fifteen minutes away. This is a GREAT location!"

We moved in two weeks later. We very rarely saw our neighbors not in Klan robes. We were, however, able to walk to a very nice playground, which is important when there are three young children involved.

In the summer of 1994, we moved from the center of Georgia to southern Delaware. My father drove up there for a new job eight months before we moved and he found what he told us was "the perfect house" and put down a security deposit. We would be renting it until we found a home to buy.

"It's great," he told us. "It's got three huge bedrooms. It's on sixteen acres of semi-forrested land. It's off the main road. You can walk to the library. You can walk to the elementary school. It's on the river and there's a dock so I can take the kids fishing. You're going to love it. The location is amazing!"

We got there and very quickly discovered why the rent was so low: the place was falling apart. There was a hole in the bathroom floor. It being the only bathroom in the house, this presented a bit of a problem. It was in front of the toilet, so when you pulled your pants down, you had to straddle the hole, and anyone in the living room below got a view they didn't really want. My father put a piece of plywood over it and called it a day. But he couldn't fix the holes in the wall of one of the bedrooms or the mold growing behind the wallpaper in that bedroom. So my sister and I shared the master bedroom, my brother got the second bedroom, and my parents slept in the dining room. That third bedroom was used for storage, and we ended up throwing away most of what was kept in there because of all the mold.

My father was deaf to our complaints. "But the LOCATION! It's perfect!"

We moved out nine months later.

We had a few nice houses between then and where we are now. Good location, decent houses, nothing terrible going on with them.

But now my mother and I are sharing a house that's a twin, in an absolutely PERFECT location. We can walk to a dozen restaurants. We can walk to two parks. Should the need arise, we can walk to the high school where I graduated (they do fairs sometimes, and we enjoy the musicals they put on every year). Our town has tons of festivals throughout the year, and we're 2 blocks from where they're held. We can walk to two grocery stores. The Halloween, Memorial Day, Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and I'm sure others I've forgotten parades pass a block away from us. We can sit out on our back porch and hear both nature and the bustle of a not-quite-small-town life.

It really is the PERFECT location. And location is everything, right? That's what they say. Location, location, location.

Our attached neighbor is batshit fucking crazy. Literally. He's got bats living in his house and there's poop on his porch. He's also got squirrels in his roof and a hole in his backyard where we're pretty sure a well used to be and wasn't filled in properly. Or something. But it's at his gate that he has to walk through to get to the alley behind our houses, which is where the trash goes. As the hole is rather large, he can't get around it. Rather than take care of the hole, he just has a couple of kayaks in his backyard filled with bags of trash. And standing water. He has no kitchen window, so there's vines growing from outside to inside his house. There's a tree growing through his roof in the backyard.

It's gross.

My advice to anyone looking to buy a home: Location only gets you so far. Make sure other important details are considered. Maybe the house really is in the perfect location, but you've got KKK members across the street or a huge hole in your bathroom floor.

Location isn't everything.
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