Looking for a House

Dave & the Boys, The Grand Canyon - As we distract ourselves from home shopping
Dave & the Boys, The Grand Canyon – As we distract ourselves from home shopping

For the last few months when we are in town it seems as though we spend all of our time looking at houses.

If we live in Salt Lake City it seems as though we will only live in a few specific neighborhoods. Call us crazy, but we love the mountains, we also think we need to live in the progressive areas. Somehow we have it in our minds that there are only two or three of these progressive areas. Are we boxing ourselves in?

Really the main draw to these neighborhoods is that they have cool old Victorian, Craftsman and Tudor style homes. The neighborhoods are a close walk (something I enjoy and often have to bribe Dave into doing), to shops, parks, and groovy eateries. What we are finding is that these OLD homes come at a high price and with a lot of Funk.

Let me show you one of my favorites. We call it the Porn Star meets Serial Killer House. This house is famous in the area because each year it has the scariest Halloween decorations. (Both my Mom and our realtor separately mentioned this tid-bit before we viewed the house.) In fact, when we drive by it, Kyle says, “That is the spooky house Mom.”

In case you were wondering, the house was scary inside too.

Curiously, I couldn’t find pictures of the basement apartment on the real estate site. The basin, the forty year old dusty kitchen, the 6′ x 9″ room, the time-stained cement floors… let me just say the words, “Did Jeffrey Dahmer live here?” came up.

We move back up the stairs through the early 1980’s sky blue kitchen tile counter oak wood everywhere wood burning stove remodel, and up the stairs to the lair. All we saw was thick mauve carpet. We opened the door and down the carpeted stairs to the Bob Guccione, long narrow tub pleasure powder room/secret Salt Lake City Porn Film location.

“You say this house is over 250k? It is on an extremely busy street. It needs new plumbing? What?”

Over and over this is the story.

We did; however, find one cute remodel, an old Victorian. Still we faced sticker shock. “We thought the cost of living was lower in Utah?”

Again we say, “We love the mountains. We love WaWa (Grandma Jean). We love the familiarity, But we are running into a lot of BUTs. Are you noticing a theme?”

One thought on “Looking for a House

  1. What is your email address? We have an email group for Provo friends, please join. Good luck finding a place to put down roots. Bryce & I know how hard it is and here we still are as a testament to it. I lean towards Colorado but we’re too broke to move!
    I also noticed your message was written at 1 am. Life must be crazy if you have 2 kids and your not in bed by 11.
    Hope to see you soon!

    provohippies-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
    >
    > Join the Provo Hippies email group by sending a
    > message to the address
    > listed above. Post
    > life updates, parties, general info…

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