House Hunters: Lingwood Edition Revealed

Tonight we signed the lease! Forget the options? Check last night's post here.

We chose.....



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Option THREE!!!! Country Mansion with Alpaca Neighbors

We LOVE LOVE LOVE this house and can't wait to move in. Here is the breakdown and the "reveal" of the real situations. I apologize for tricking you when I wrote the post last night to make it sound like the three options were all amazing.

House 1: Whomping Willow. We truly loved the character of this house. It had many of the characteristics we are looking for in our forever home. The sunroom offered me an amazing craft space and Mark would have plenty of space for an office. However, the bottom line was that with the oil heat and window unit A/C, we were worried we would freeze in the winter and burn in the summer. In addition to that, the layout was quirky and the kitchen had odd dining space, forcing us into choosing between a dining room and a guest bedroom. And, although it was a single family home, it was stuck right in the middle of tons of townhomes and all the way out in Christiansburg, making for a longer drive than Mark currently has now in LA. The final nail in the coffin was the pet policy--if we wanted to get a dog, we would have to pretend like we only had one cat and we could only get a 30lb or less dog.

House 2: Big City Living in the Country. I can't believe people actually thought we might pick this option!!! This was actually our back up option to be used in an emergency "we don't have anywhere to live" situation only. Clearly we have not been complaining loudly enough about our small space living situation. We are not interested in ever sharing walls, or floors, or ceilings, or walkways, or parking, or anything about our living space with 500+ other residents ever again. For the last six years we have had 

PHENOMENAL COSMIC POWERS 

but we've been stuck in 

ittty bitty living spaces. 

In addition to generally not wanting to have anything to do with an apartment ever again, this particular apartment wanted to nickel and dime us with $200 application processing fees (in addition to the application fee), non-optional cable packages, absurd pet policies, and was basically over priced. It also seemed to have a slight undergrad problem, mostly in that it had some. 

House 3: Our new house! We basically walked in and said "we'll take it." It was a bit more than that of course-- we toured the whole thing and had a quick private talk, but there wasn't much discussion for us. It has everything we want, especially tons and tons of space. It is also heated/cooled with a heat pump and located on an adorable country road. It has ceiling fans in the upstairs in addition to dual climate control for the two floors. There is a large back deck, huge fenced yard (can you hear the sound of a doggy playing fetch?) and a huge front yard. Not only do we get such an amazing yard, but we don't have to take care of it. Yard care is included in our rent. While there's no garage, there is a shed for tools and stuff in the backyard. Most importantly and hardest to quantify, it felt like home. There are definite downsides, but we'll make them work and, after all, we're not buying it and we didn't have tons of options. We are looking forward to moving into it in three weeks and making it our new home. Now... where to buy furniture, and possibly a pool table? 

Here I am again, showing off our new house: (I thought for sure this picture would give it away!)