Major Event #2: The House

For the majority of my readership, this was chronicled in a recent trip up North. But I'll recap for posterity, as well as the one or two others who might have an interest in the nuts of it all.

I've maintained a long-standing dalliance with a house move. This is not new territory. Sharon & I moved into our current house one year into marriage, back in 1998. There was little thought of raising a family, energy upgrades, "walkability,""community," etc. We needed a place which was affordable on a meager income that was also not coming apart at the seams.

What we found at the time was a sturdy little home that was built for the post-WWII inner-ring laborers in North Minneapolis. A granny house. Orange carpeting throughout, and electrical/gas/piping/etc that had not been updated in 30 years. The outdated nature of the facilities has become our quality & energy efficiency playground, as we've updated it all - and generally to the highest possible energy efficient capability, short of pure solar/wind. And a choice borne out of necessity has proven to be one of the defining circumstances of our life: a surrounding community and set of environs & amenities that has essentially cemented our loyalty to our neighborhood into the foreseeable future.

But we've also smacked head-on into the actual structural limitations of our house. As our tastes have become a little more refined and our family has grown, we've become a little frustrated at the lack of flow & openness, as well as the cramped feel of an eat-in kitchen and dominating features of a central staircase and hallway. In addition, while a large number of our friends live in North Minneapolis, that is not so much the case in the surrounding few blocks. There are other areas of North, and one in particular (the "Victory Neighborhood"), which have beautiful stucco tudor-styled homes and early-century floorplans. Our "sub-neighborhood" predominately consists of the same type of small, uninventive little "banger" in which we live. That has resulted in a generally lower level of home ownership and, frankly, fewer peers. Lucy, alone, has about five relatively close friends living in this same seven block by seven block section of North (and our family, in total, knows probably a couple of dozen families); while in our neighborhood, we tend to have kids from rental houses running free & unsupervised (some as young as two or three) in the middle of the street, late into the evening. Not to mention being involved in a series of misdemeanor-type offenses up and down the block. Just not the type of environment we are excited to have our kids growing up in proximity to.

So this combination of factors, including with the equity we believed we had accumulated in our house and current historic low interest rates, drove us to explore the notion of moving into Victory, to be within blocks of many friends and into an area with a greater sense of community. We went so far as to be pre-approved for a mortgage and begin touring some houses.

Well, to make a long-story short, some of our financial assumptions, in particular the amount we had truly lost in equity (e.g. pretty much everything - our area was extremely hard hit from foreclosure, and prices have not recovered) and the relative house prices between our neighborhood and the other, did not prove out as we had assumed. And, the more we investigated the interior and "guts" of prospective houses, the more we appreciated the solid foundation and interior investments we had made in our own. And the more we thought about it, the less favorably the parks & trail system in Victory compared to the parks & trails around our home, which may be among the best of anywhere in the Midwest. And yards in my neighborhood are much bigger (11 homes per block as compared to 15 in Victory). And you can hear toads calling from my back yard. And on and on.

And personally, I started to hold fast to some of my personal values about simplicity and non-wastefulness; realizing that some of these things I'd been looking for in another home: larger bathroom, dining room, etc. are things that simply aren't necessary for happiness. We can (and should) (and will) do some aesthetic interior upgrades to our own home, and are actually currently in the process of working out what sort of cash-out-refinance we can leverage, given the lower interest rate, to keep out monthly outlay about the same as it currently is, while rolling in our mortgage and a low-interest community fix-up loan we've been paying on for a few years. We're hoping we'll come out with an extra $10,000 or so with which to utterly remodel our bathroom and re-do the hardwood floors. In the meantime, there's some sweat-equity stuff we can take on ourselves: painting, some more landscaping, etc.

We may yet end up doing a move someday. It still doesn't seem likely that the character (e.g. the characters who reside within the houses around us) of our neighborhood change significantly in the next handful of years. I do wish Lucy & Rose had some "backyard friends." But in the big scheme of things, they're not all that far from their friends in North. And - good God, we live in the age of cars and, in a scant handful of years for our girls, bikes. And when my intellect is involved, I realize I have little to fear from the "bad influence" factor. My girls are smart and perceptive, and have the tools to gravitate to positive influences. So if we end up moving someday, to achieve a little more immediate "community," and maybe a dream house in terms of design flow, we're going to do it right, and it's going to be when & if Sharon is back in the workforce and we have a little more purchasing power. The key to a little more peace of mind in the near-term is to just let that go until the time feels right.