Ever since I decided to sell my condo and live in sin by moving in with Iggy, I have wanted to sell his place. Maybe not the nicest start to things (hey, I love you, but we have to sell this dump and move). But it was a little bit of the traditional American love story, the American Dream (if you will) to buy a house *together*...
I was sorta reticent to broach the subject, so I've been slowly fixing up the current place. Sorta to make it part "mine" and part in preparation for showing it. I worry sometimes that we might make it too nice and we'll never get to get a new place together.
Somehow the new house bug hit Iggy hard about 2 weeks ago. He started searching Zillow.com and showing me houses on his iPAD during the evenings. Last weekend he came up with a plan to drive buy 6 or 8 of them and canvas the neighborhoods so we could get a feel for how much our money would get us. It was fun, but strangely exhausting. We covered several distinct areas of Denver and the suburbs (Capitol Hill, Cherry Creek, Lowry, Upper Lo-Do, and a couple I don't know the names of). I had to take a nap when we got home.
This weekend Iggy's real estate buddy drove us around to look at the insides of a few of the homes. Surprisingly some of the houses we looked at last weekend had already sold! I thought this was a tough seller's market. But maybe the economy is picking up after all...
At any rate, the inside of the first one (Lowry) was lovely, peaceful, contemporary...and maybe a little too "suburbia" for me. It felt a lot like every other house on the block This isn't bad. It's just part of the atmosphere.
The second house had strange levels (1 step up into the dining room, 1 step down into the kitchen, 1 step up into the family room, etc) and tile on the entire main level. It backed up to an apartment complex where people seemed to be working on their cars and milling about in the parking lot. And it smelled funny to me. We didn't even look at the upstairs or the basement.
The third house was built in 1899 and within blocks of downtown - walking distance to a couple restaurants we've tried and liked, a cool indie grocery/market/butcher shop, Daz Bog, etc. I could already feel my shift to hipster-wannabe starting. It wasn't much more room than we have now and the yard was mostly deck with a token amount of lawn/grass. The master bedroom had a lofted reading nook accessible only via a ladder. Can't decide if that's cool or I'd only use it under duress. It had an older kitchen, but some updates around the house. The current owners were clearly fans of IKEA based on the furnishings and the $3500 gift card offered at closing. The garage would take a 12-point turn for me to get my Subaru Outback station wagon into. (Definitely getting a smaller, hipper car if we move to this one.) The biggest worry was the staircase to the upstairs. Not sure Radar could make it...it's open and twisty (and cool) and wooden (read: slick for dogs whose back legs aren't so good anymore). Guess I'm not ready to be a hipster quite yet. (sigh)
The 4th house was just north of City Park and close to the city golf course. This means it's close to the zoo and the history museum. I pictured myself with a museum membership and walking over on afternoons to browse thorough the latest Paleontology or Egyptology exhibit. Very chic. Very intellectual. (And even healthy since I'm walking.) But it wasn't within walking distance of the museum. And the neighborhood felt like a ghost town, sterile, and vaguely creepy for being so well-kept and respectable on the outside but having no people present or outside on a Saturday afternoon. It was a pop-top but the added 2nd floor was done in the cheapest, most artificial way (loved the bathroom, but the vent looked like someone punched a hole in the wall and covered it with a grate to camouflage it). There was a strange closet in the kitchen where the microwave was housed. Like a mini-pantry, I guess. The downstairs ceiling was low enough that our 6'3" realtor's head touched the top at points. So much for my snooty intellectual dream.
The last house was in Cherry Creek. It turns out it was within walking distance of 3 coffee shops, a deli, and within 7 blocks you start hitting restaurants regularly listed in 5280 magazine. 7 blocks to the Cherry Creek Mall (and movie theater). The house was maybe 5% bigger than our current one (I was hoping for more space and better closets). But! It had several kick-ass features: a fire pit outside on the patio, a walk-in wine cellar, a wet bar downstairs, an awesome kitchen with high-end appliances and a breakfast bar. The master bedroom had dinky closets but a bathroom almost the size of the bedroom itself. It might be hard to fit our furniture and clothes into this space -- granted I do need to get rid of some of my old stuff, so maybe it's not a terrible challenge. The biggest downside was that it back up to a major street (the front is on another street, but the back is on a street that has traffice 24/7). Can we live with the noise to be within blocks of Cherry Creek, the Cherry Creek Arts Festival, etc?
Who knew the American Dream was so picky? Or maybe that's just me...
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