O RLY?!

Abbey and I have been looking at houses on the internet for quite sometime now. The plan has been to move out of this apartment when the lease is up in April. I finally took the first step and got approved for a mortgage, so now we are planning on visiting some houses with an agent.

We ended up settling on Bexley as the neighborhood of choice. The very first place we started looking was Grandview. We both liked the urban setting and the houses are unique and each has its own character. Many local shops and restaurants are within walking distance and the school system is very good. Even though it will be a long while before we have someone in school, I’ve come the realization that good schools usually equals low crime and respectable residents. This turned out to be slightly out of our price range. We then briefly considered Westerville and Worthington. Not wanting to live too far east ruled out Westerville, and Worthington was a little too pricey as well.

Next on the list was Hilliard. Most of the houses in our price range were in subdivisions of mass produced houses built in the late 80s/early 90s. Every third house looks the same and they all have small yards with no trees. I could not get over how trashy a lot of these subdivisions were. A lot of houses had 4+ cars in the driveway…half of them broken down, garbage in the yards, horrible looking grass and landscaping, etc. Its as if they transplanted the ghetto into suburbia. Any neighborhoods that were even remotely friendly looking were way out of our price range.

That brought us to Bexley. Similar style houses and neighborhoods to Grandview, very good schools and infrastructure (which carries high taxes with it), and many houses within our price range. Don’t get me wrong, Bexley has its share of half a million dollar homes, but also many in the 100k-200k range sprinkled throughout.

Some things we are looking for in a home:

• 2 car garage (preferably detached)
• At least 1.5 bathrooms
• At least 3 bedrooms
• Some sort of a basement (finished or not)
• Fenced yard (to hold the monster)
• Good sized kitchen with updated appliances

I’ll post again when we come close to making a decision.