In the vein of finding homes that are too expensive and that we can never have, and DH's pentient for showing them to me, I set out to find something with some serious bells and whistles that we could afford and show it to DH. Not super seriously or anything, just to make the point.
Well, I found a doozy in our price range, albeit it closer to the high end and with yearly taxes of $4700. I went down my checklist. 5 acres. One level. House in good repair. At least 1500 square feet (it's 2500). Outbuildings for storage and for rabbit housing and chicken housing. Garden area. Mature fruit trees. A private well. A shop. Room for DS's model train layouts. A pond. A wood stove for back up heat. A large and roomy kitchen (plus beautiful). Close to family (2 miles from sister-in-law and nieces, 5 miles to MIL and FIL, 15 minutes from Mom and town.) Good school district.
And then for the bells and whistles. An indoor swimming pool and hot tub. A glass and brick green house. And...a small hanger for a Cessna airplane, with a shared private landing strip with dues of 45 a year!
It's $374,500. With our planned down payment of $60,000, we'd still be walking away with a pretty big mortgage and monthly payment. And I don't actually want a super big mortgage with college in the picture soon. The cost to heat a pool would actually be less than heating a house if we istalled a heat pump to exchange air from the house to the pool and back, using the pool as a heat sink. And we could rent the hanger to someone with a small plane so get a bit of income on the side to help with the mortgae payment. I'm not seriously considering it, of course, but I thought it was fun to find something like this anyway.
We are too far away from buying a house yet to be serious about anything. Still just looking and dreaming.
I'd still be happier with the almost 20 acre place for $305,000.
Still Farm and House Hunting
April 29th, 2013 at 01:54 am
April 30th, 2013 at 09:43 pm 1367354601