To be honest, our neighbors were really not that noisy this summer. The construction is done, where ever they keep the radio now that the construction is done we can't hear it inside our house; they didn't have a lot of parties. If it's just the family that lives there hanging out outside, we can't even hear them from inside our house, but get 8-10 kids and grown men who torment and try to drown them in the pool and it can get noisy, but even at that it was never noisy past 8pm. Ever.
But, we still like the idea of more land. We still feel "closed in" here, like everything is too close. Our first house was on 2.8 acres on top of a mountain and that was what we had always wanted, BUT there was nowhere for kids to ride bikes, it was far into town, it was far from friends, it took one full day on the weekend to maintain the yard. I grew up in a fairly rural area and always LOVED visiting my friends who lived in condos or my grandmother who lived in the city because I could walk and bike places. So, when we bought this house, that was what we wanted: an area where the girls could bike and walk to friends' homes; where I could get to the store in under an hour; where lawn maintenance took a few hours and left time for barbecuing with friends or heading to the beach or on a day trip on the weekends; where we could bring take-out home without it getting cold. Little things like that.
And for a while that was what was important. The girls did ride bikes and walk to friends' homes all the time. But...Allie will be driving next year and Piper two years after that...the time of being able to bike is not so important, having more space is more important to us now; having roads that are not super congested for young drivers to learn on is becoming important. We loved being closer to stores, being able to hop in the car and get that missing ingredient and be back in ten minutes, running to Home Depot for that thing we forgot for the project. But, having more control over our food is becoming more important. We want to grow more of what we eat and we need more land for that.
So, we continued to look at houses this summer.
One was too close to high tension wires for my comfort.
One was across the street from 5 busy soccer fields. Noise. Traffic.
One had 2 acres behind it, but on the sides was closer to neighbors than we are now.
One was in the middle of a town, and although it had beautiful property, we decided we didn't want to be that close to a busy intersection.
One was perfect, but they had to sell that house to buy another house and couldn't entertain an offer where we had to sell a house to buy a house.
The real goal is a view like one of these, all of these photos are from homes we looked at this summer. I will miss not having a view like this.
The girls are on board with the idea of moving.
In fact, they are getting excited about it and looking at realtor.com and sending us photos.
They want a second full bath and bedrooms that have more character, even if the rooms are smaller, than what they have now.
Allie's best friend has moved over an hour away, but we still see her.
Piper's friends - our former homeschool neighbors - we are close enough with that we know they would come and visit often.
So they know they will still see their friends.
And just as we get to point of saying, "Let's just list this house! Let's do this!"
Something happens that makes us re-think it.
We head to the beach for the day and realize...we are 40 minutes from the beach.
We head to the city for the day and think how awesome it is to be 40 minutes from Manhattan.
We drop the girls off at the mall with friends and head home to finish a project and realize there are no malls where we are looking at houses.
The girls have been talking about working at the mall since they were tiny.
This move will add another 40 minutes on to those times, 80 minutes round trip, too long to drop the girls off and run home.
Jason's company makes the decision to transfer him to yet another branch...which, since we live so central in our state is an easy commute, but if we had moved...it could have been a nightmare commute!
We bought this house in this area because it was so central, close to so much...and there is something to be said for that as well...
So we are no closer to coming to a decision about moving.
But the girls and I do LOVE looking at houses - online and in person - and dreaming about how we would decorate them. We spent A LOT of time this summer painting rooms in our minds and discussing fabrics and furniture layouts.
