While we were in Pitman, my dad mentioned to James that we should consider buying a house instead of renting when we move to Boston. At first James thought my dad was crazy, but the more he thought about it, and looked at where the housing market is right now, and how low the mortgage interest rates are, and how the prices will eventually start creeping up again... the more he liked the idea. So we drove up to Haverhill, MA on Tuesday, and stayed with some very nice friends of my parents (yay free!). Wednesday, we met with a real estate lady and saw some properties. Thursday we had our interviews (I got one too!), which were very successful, and more house-seeing. Friday we saw a few more houses before we drove back to NJ. We never got down to visit Beantown, but we'll have plenty of time for that in the future.
One of the houses we saw on Wednesday was a little two story Victorian that's very similar to the one I grew up in, which my parents still live in. It's cute and quirky, and we love it. It does need some work, the floors especially need sanding and refinishing, and all of the wood trim downstairs needs to be stripped and either repainted or refinished. But it has a nicely sized backyard where we could have a pretty substantial garden, and it's cozy and the livingroom and master bedrooms were sunny. And there are two full bathrooms. The kitchen is teensy tiny, but there's a large room right off of it that we could use to extend the kitchen a bit with some strategically placed islands or something, with plenty of room left over for a dining area. (The ad calls it a "fabulous eat-in kitchen," so they must be considering the larger room as part of the kitchen.) We would eventually want to remodel the kitchen to make it bigger.
And it's a much more manageable price - we could afford more, but it would really put a strain on us, and we just don't want to spread ourselves to thin. And we like the idea of working on the house and fixing it up and making it really charming.
The other houses we saw were either in the same price range and therefore tiny and cramped and, oddly enough, sometimes with only one bathroom on the opposite side of the house from the bedrooms. May not seem like much of a big deal, until you have to get up to pee at 4 in the morning in the middle of winter. Or the houses were more expensive but had their own oddities - weirdly cramped livingroom/diningroom areas thanks to the chimney from the furnace randomly in the middle of the room, or master bedrooms so small they could hold a king sized bed and that's it, or TWO sump pumps in the basement. One more-expensive house had weird linolium tiles in all of the bedrooms - it felt like a hospital in there!
So even though the Dewey St house has some issues and will need some work, none of the other houses were perfect, either. We thought we'd be getting quite a deal if we went for the Dewey house. There was a lot of debating and weighing our options and looking at our finances and talking with parentals for advice. A more expensive but nicer house that still has some issues, or a less expensive house that will require a lot of work (and some unknown amount of money) to fix up? We kept coming back to the house on Dewey Street. We both just had a good feeling about it and we could both see ourselves living there.
We went back to see the Dewey house again on the last day, and we decided to do it. We filed the paperwork to put an offer on the house, which the real estate lady is holding for us until we get formal job offers from the Boston Raythen (we had verbals, but we didn't want to pull the trigger on this until we were absolutely certain we have jobs). Those should be coming soon, and our offer on the house will be going in as soon as we get them.
I have pictures of the interior, which I will post if and when the house is ours, but for now:
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