Hearts in Hawai'i
The Move--Sep. 3
9/3/2010
Prior to the day when a co-worker pointed me to a Virtual Tour posted on the internet, the idea of buying a house had always been one of those "maybe one day, when we get around to it" things. We thought ourselves content with apartment living. Sure, it wasn't Nirvana. Neighbors smoking adjacent and under us had become more intolerable with passing time. People coming in drunk at night and banging around above us, vacuuming their floors at 11 p.m.; these were things we tried to accept as a "small price to pay" for relatively cheap rent and convenience. In the end, these things would trigger a major life change.
As I viewed the virtual tour of this brand new townhouse up in Proctor, a short seven miles from where we currently lived, I was somewhat impressed but not overly so. The kitchen particularly jumped out at me, but there were a few issues. First, we'd no long be able to walk to work. Not that we had been walking to work recently, anyway; I had been driving us to work for years despite the short (0.7 miles) distance from home. The stairs, while not an issue yet, someday could become an issue considering the early osteoarthritis in my knees diagnosed two years ago.
Then there was the cost. Maybe not so much the cost, but the idea I'd held that, if I was going to plunk down this much cash and incur this much long-term debt, I wanted some land. I didn't want to share a wall with a neighbor! In short, I was locked into the idea of traditional house ownership. One of the downsides of this particular townhouse was that there was very little grass in front of our house. We would have a neighbor on the other side of two separate walls. It was something I would have to change my attitude about.
Patty was very excited and wanted to view the place in person immediately. I went along more out of curiosity than anything else. I saw it as being the first of several places we would look at before deciding (or not) on a new place to live, a home of our own. In short, I had no real expectations and went to the viewing with a certain amount of skepticism.
That skepticism was short lived. Virtual Tours are basically designed to make a place look better than it really is. Highlight the plusses, don't show the minuses. In this case, the virtual tour didn't do the house justice. While the living room and dining room weren't very large (indeed, only about 30-50 sq ft larger than our current place), the kitchen was outstanding. Good size, tons of cupboard and counter space, a breakfast nook. In our current place, every time we were both in the kitchen it was nearly a wrestling match of jostling for position at the two small counter spaces. One entire half-counter had been dominated by cereal boxes due to a lack of cupboard space. Here there was no such issue. We would be able to work together in the kitchen in comfort while staying out of each others way.
There was a half-bathroom on this floor (years later I would learn these are called "powder rooms") with hookups inside the closet for a washer/dryer combo. At the far end of the kitchen was a closet (one of eight closets in the house) next to an exit door leading to a two-stall heated garage. Nice!
The stairs led up to a loft (roughly 10x17 in size) which would be a perfect TV room, or reading room, or whatever you wanted to set up there. I had initially considered using it for my office but the lack of a window in this room soon ruled such usage out. There were three bedrooms and two full bathrooms. The master bedroom was markedly larger than our current bedroom. The only real downside I could see was that the third bedroom (which would become my office) was no larger than my current office. However, since this room was in the NE corner of the house, there were a window on the north and the east side. Very nice!
After going through the house somewhat quickly with Dee Bennett from Messina and Associates, we told her we'd let her know in a few days to a week what we thought and if we were seriously interested in pursuing a purchase.
Outside view of the "older" building (49 Waterview Dr), built in 2007
Unit we first looked at, kitchen without the appliances installed.
Previous: 5/10/2010--Our Trip to Hawai'i (2010)--Day 23
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