Move: Loving the Location
Now that we've been living in our new house for about a month, we've come to realize how wonderful this place is.
First, there's the house itself. Downsizing from a large house to a smaller condo taught Darwin and me that we aren't smaller place people. We like room to sprawl. Darwin says that rather than having shared spaces, he likes "dedicated spaces," meaning a space for office work, a space for food prep, a space for recreation, a space for exercise, and so on. There's a part of me that says a three-bedroom house with a finished basement is a waste of money and resources for two men with no kids at home, but another part of me likes having a big house.
So we like our big house. We have an office area separate from the bedroom. We--or I--have a huge kitchen with a gas stove (after thirty years, I finally have a gas stove again). We have a wonderful open concept conducive to entertaining.* We have a finished basement with plenty of room for the exercise machines. We have wood floors that are easier to keep clean than wall-to-wall carpeting. We have a first-floor laundry room. We have a garage.
And there's the location.
The house is on the outer corner of a subdivision. The subdivision is, unfortunately, one of those plastic, every house alike, no trees place. But we're on the edge, so we don't actually have to look at or drive through the plastic. There's also a border of trees on our back yard. Literally a block away, we have farmland and forest and dirt roads, which makes me insanely happy--I can ride my bike in the country again.
We're ten minutes away from downtown Ypsilanti. We're 13 minutes from downtown Ann Arbor. A major grocery store, hardware store, and big-box variety store are all within 5 minutes. And Cottage Inn Pizza delivers to our house.
We love this place quite a lot.
*I know current thinking in housing is to denigrate open concepts on the bounds that your kitchen is in your living room, and what about the smells and the mess when you have people over? My answer to that is, why are you cooking something that smells so awful, and why are you leaving a mess in the first place?
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First, there's the house itself. Downsizing from a large house to a smaller condo taught Darwin and me that we aren't smaller place people. We like room to sprawl. Darwin says that rather than having shared spaces, he likes "dedicated spaces," meaning a space for office work, a space for food prep, a space for recreation, a space for exercise, and so on. There's a part of me that says a three-bedroom house with a finished basement is a waste of money and resources for two men with no kids at home, but another part of me likes having a big house.
So we like our big house. We have an office area separate from the bedroom. We--or I--have a huge kitchen with a gas stove (after thirty years, I finally have a gas stove again). We have a wonderful open concept conducive to entertaining.* We have a finished basement with plenty of room for the exercise machines. We have wood floors that are easier to keep clean than wall-to-wall carpeting. We have a first-floor laundry room. We have a garage.
And there's the location.
The house is on the outer corner of a subdivision. The subdivision is, unfortunately, one of those plastic, every house alike, no trees place. But we're on the edge, so we don't actually have to look at or drive through the plastic. There's also a border of trees on our back yard. Literally a block away, we have farmland and forest and dirt roads, which makes me insanely happy--I can ride my bike in the country again.
We're ten minutes away from downtown Ypsilanti. We're 13 minutes from downtown Ann Arbor. A major grocery store, hardware store, and big-box variety store are all within 5 minutes. And Cottage Inn Pizza delivers to our house.
We love this place quite a lot.
*I know current thinking in housing is to denigrate open concepts on the bounds that your kitchen is in your living room, and what about the smells and the mess when you have people over? My answer to that is, why are you cooking something that smells so awful, and why are you leaving a mess in the first place?
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