House Hunting: The Cottage In The Woods: a house log
We have been passively house hunting for a few weeks now (driving around distinct neighborhoods, checking out pics on MLS, and popping into a few of them every now and then) and are at last getting around to writing about it. It is remarkable how frantically cleaning your own house and scheduling showings can distract you from in fact blogging about the thrill of the hunt for a new place.
Part of our delay has also been deciding the best way to share this house hunting journey with you folks. We’d enjoy to show every nook and cranny of each place, but at the same time we want to respect the privacy of each home’s seller (after all, unlike HGTV’s House Hunters these folks have not signed up to have their homes pluses and minuses publicly dissected for all to see).
So after much debate we chose to only share a (slightly doctored) exterior photo along with a description of the house’s pros and cons with thoughts on whether it is a good fit for us. With that said, let us start with the place we began calling “The Cottage In The Woods” that we lately toured. We found this one driving around getting lost in a nearby neighborhood and got crazy excited about it before knowing anything about it. Nearly “we do not even need to see in inside” excited. It truly was that charming from the outside.
THE STATS:
- Age: 1953
- House size: 1,905 square feet
- Lot size: 1.4 acres of land
- Bedrooms: 3
- Bathrooms: 2
THE PROS:
- Old, modest and in need of some TLC
- Amazingly private lot that is bursting with charm (you drive about 150 feet through the woods before you even see the house)
- Strong neighborhood and schools
- Pleasant open living and dining room
THE CONS:
- No en-suite bathroom
- Cramped kitchen (about half the size of our current one) with no room to expand
- 2 bedrooms on the main floor, one in the basement
- Low ceiling in basement (like I-had-to-duck low)
So despite having been won over by the exterior, the interior left plenty to be desired for our open-and-airy loving hearts (and our I-do not-like-to-touch-basement-ceilings heads). We are all about taking a small compartmentalized house and blowing out some walls, but this specific layout did not seem quite conducive to those kinds of changes as all. And the fact that one of the bedrooms was in the low-ceilinged basement complete with a dehumidifier (while we’d prefer to keep all the bedrooms close together and above grade so we can be near Clara and future child(s) in their earlier years of life) left us feeling like this house would be “settling.” Thus our dream of living in this secluded little cottage in the woods came crumbling down. Oh well, on to the next one!
Altered exterior photo taken by us and edited thanks to our friend Photoshop.
Psst- Do not forget about our big nerve-wracking appearance on The Nate Show this coming Monday the 25th (more details here). Fingers crossed that we do not look like big starstruck geeks.
