New House

We made an offer on a house last week. It is a farmhouse ~ 5 miles from my work. We have agonized about where we wanted to live and what kind of house we were looking for. This was worsened by the huge housing market here. There was a big building boom in the 90's and housing prices have been stagnant since then. That means that there are lots of houses for sale, especially older homes that Leila and I liked for reasonable prices. We debated whether we want to be as Leila says "city mice" or "country mice." My work is about 10 miles south of town, so moving closer to work means further from town.

There are some nice little towns in the area. The closest is Romney at ~ 1 mile from work, but four houses were for sale (out of maybe 50 total). Three were on the highway, and one was two bedroom and like 300 sq feet. Linden, Attica, and Crawfordsville are further south, also quite nice. New Richmond is to the west; it is where Hoosiers was filmed. I was dissappointed to find out that the gym in the movie has since been torn down. It is quite picturesque. To the east are Clarks Hill and Stockton. Lots of the houses for sale in these areas were built in the early 1900s. These little towns are quite small with less than 500 people in most. Crawfordsville is larger.

The house we put an offer on is a farmhouse, built around 1920. It has a large pole barn and walnut trees around it. It has an attic bedroom with sloped ceilings and a gabled roof. The kitchen is smallish and needs a new stove and refrigerator. There are wood floors in the bedrooms and under the carpet in the living room. It only has one bath, but it has a nice cellar. The washer dryer hookups are down there as well as a root cellar and the furnace. This is the house that we saw, liked and wanted to see again after we had pre approval from the bank, but then someone else made an offer by then. We thought it was out of the picture till last week when our realtor told us it was available, the financing fell through for the other buyers, but we had to move fast. We made an offer, but we haven't been back to tour the inside. There are many details that we don't have because of that, but we feel good about it. There is room for an orchard and for us to get some animals for Emily to take care of.