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The last couple of days we've driven around some of the local neighborhoods, just looking for interesting houses.
The area roughly around our apartment-ish, and similarly the area I grew up in, are very... strange neighborhoods, that are just a wild mishmash of zoning and styles and ages and lots of streets that don't even try to resemble a grid.
Mostly it's not anything SUPER old, not like hundreds of years or anything, though some (like the house we had when I was a kid) date back to the 20s and 30s, so are approaching a century. A lot of the stuff isn't on a grid, because this wasn't really much of a city when it was built. We had aerial photos of my childhood home that showed the major roads nearby as little two-lane dirt roads at the time, haha. More of the houses are probably from the 50s-70s.
Most don't have a ton of land, though some have a few acres. Some have horses or other livestock. Lots have beautiful old trees, and some have fantastic elaborate flower or vegetable gardens.
It beats the ever loving SHIT out of any of the "covenant-controlled communities", or the newer mcmansion-lite developments. (Knowing how many issues my mom has with her HOA, and seeing the prevailing standards of bland that all the local ones are proud to enforce... genuinely, NOT having an HOA could be one of my top requirements for buying a home.)
It's kind of a bittersweet exercise, though. A little house like that, with enough yard to have a garden, and some nice shade trees, with a yard a dog could run around in... that doesn't seem like it should be a wildly extravagant dream. And yet, like for many people around my age, I know it's vanishingly unlikely that I'll ever be able to afford such a thing. At least not here, and I really don't want to leave. (Alex wants to go back to the east coast, but housing prices aren't *that* much better there, except in areas that we probably wouldn't want to live.) I finally have what's basically a lower middle-class job, but on that income alone, we'll never be able to afford an actual house.
Yesterday we did drive up the street I grew up on. It's painfully cliche, but damn did everything feel smaller than I remember it, heh. The street felt narrower, the driveways looked shorter, the yards looked smaller... I was in high school when we moved, so it's not like I was *actually* a tiny child, but it was still a bit jarring. The people who bought our house have changed a lot. A lot of my mom's gardens are gone. One of the big blue spruces is gone, though one is still there. I'd probably be horrified to see the backyard, ha. We didn't creep too close, so I couldn't quite do an inventory of all the changes, but I'm not sure I'd want to.
I still dream about that house sometimes, or about places that "feel" like that house. (That specific kind of dream-logic where you know a place "is" a certain location, despite it not having any resemblance to said location.)
A few highlights from the wandering:
-A historic neighborhood that I can't even imagine trying to give delivery directions in pre-GPS, due to the utter lack of grid, deliberate similarity of every street name, and the number of small round parks that things surprise dead-end at.
-The Biggest Sunflowers
-We did pass by one large, architecturally interesting, obviously abandoned home. Would be fun to explore, but is probably waaaaay too visible to do so.
-Also passed by a house that's clearly hoarded.
-Another that looks like a pseudo-compound, with electric gates, and a ton of no trespassing signs, and big chunks of plywood and scrap wood lashed over the fences so that you can't even see most of the house from the road.
-Some gardens (both flower and vegetable) that filled me with Such Envy.
-An honest to god log cabin.
-A yard with a hippo statue as the centerpiece.
-A house with an absolutely horrible army of Halloween inflatable things. Seriously, at least 30, crammed into every inch of yard.
-So many cute, simple Halloween decorations already up. Little white fabric ghosts in trees always make me happy, ha
The area roughly around our apartment-ish, and similarly the area I grew up in, are very... strange neighborhoods, that are just a wild mishmash of zoning and styles and ages and lots of streets that don't even try to resemble a grid.
Mostly it's not anything SUPER old, not like hundreds of years or anything, though some (like the house we had when I was a kid) date back to the 20s and 30s, so are approaching a century. A lot of the stuff isn't on a grid, because this wasn't really much of a city when it was built. We had aerial photos of my childhood home that showed the major roads nearby as little two-lane dirt roads at the time, haha. More of the houses are probably from the 50s-70s.
Most don't have a ton of land, though some have a few acres. Some have horses or other livestock. Lots have beautiful old trees, and some have fantastic elaborate flower or vegetable gardens.
It beats the ever loving SHIT out of any of the "covenant-controlled communities", or the newer mcmansion-lite developments. (Knowing how many issues my mom has with her HOA, and seeing the prevailing standards of bland that all the local ones are proud to enforce... genuinely, NOT having an HOA could be one of my top requirements for buying a home.)
It's kind of a bittersweet exercise, though. A little house like that, with enough yard to have a garden, and some nice shade trees, with a yard a dog could run around in... that doesn't seem like it should be a wildly extravagant dream. And yet, like for many people around my age, I know it's vanishingly unlikely that I'll ever be able to afford such a thing. At least not here, and I really don't want to leave. (Alex wants to go back to the east coast, but housing prices aren't *that* much better there, except in areas that we probably wouldn't want to live.) I finally have what's basically a lower middle-class job, but on that income alone, we'll never be able to afford an actual house.
Yesterday we did drive up the street I grew up on. It's painfully cliche, but damn did everything feel smaller than I remember it, heh. The street felt narrower, the driveways looked shorter, the yards looked smaller... I was in high school when we moved, so it's not like I was *actually* a tiny child, but it was still a bit jarring. The people who bought our house have changed a lot. A lot of my mom's gardens are gone. One of the big blue spruces is gone, though one is still there. I'd probably be horrified to see the backyard, ha. We didn't creep too close, so I couldn't quite do an inventory of all the changes, but I'm not sure I'd want to.
I still dream about that house sometimes, or about places that "feel" like that house. (That specific kind of dream-logic where you know a place "is" a certain location, despite it not having any resemblance to said location.)
A few highlights from the wandering:
-A historic neighborhood that I can't even imagine trying to give delivery directions in pre-GPS, due to the utter lack of grid, deliberate similarity of every street name, and the number of small round parks that things surprise dead-end at.
-The Biggest Sunflowers
-We did pass by one large, architecturally interesting, obviously abandoned home. Would be fun to explore, but is probably waaaaay too visible to do so.
-Also passed by a house that's clearly hoarded.
-Another that looks like a pseudo-compound, with electric gates, and a ton of no trespassing signs, and big chunks of plywood and scrap wood lashed over the fences so that you can't even see most of the house from the road.
-Some gardens (both flower and vegetable) that filled me with Such Envy.
-An honest to god log cabin.
-A yard with a hippo statue as the centerpiece.
-A house with an absolutely horrible army of Halloween inflatable things. Seriously, at least 30, crammed into every inch of yard.
-So many cute, simple Halloween decorations already up. Little white fabric ghosts in trees always make me happy, ha
