James and I bought our first house about seven years ago, when we realized that buying in Pittsburgh is generally cheaper than renting. We thought we might relocate after a few years, but that process was hastened when River was born around the same time that there was a lot of gun violence in our neighborhood. We moved into the third floor of a commercial building we were working on renovating (long story there, for another day, maybe), which has been nice while it lasted, but wasn't really sustainable long term. For one thing, it's basically a single room place, and we're going to have two growing kids soon.
So...we thought very seriously and repeatedly about leaving Pittsburgh, primarily to find a more rural area where we could be comfortable, but this always seemed like a difficult move to make for professional and personal reasons related to leaving the city for good. Eventually we came up with a plan to find a house with a bit more room and some green space, where we could be comfortable for the next few years while we prepared for a more drastic future move.
When we started looking, a friend tipped us off to a great place in the Oakland area. It was small and had almost no yard of its own, but it was very affordable, safe, spaced comfortably from the nearest neighbors, and best of all butted right up against the border of Schenley park. We loved it right away, but needed some time to get our financing in order. Finally we were able to meet up with our realtor to do a final inspection and prepare an offer, only to learn that after a year on the market, the place had suddenly been rented. Our realtor told us that sometimes things like this happen for a reason, but we found that kind of laughable. We were pretty sure that we wouldn't find anything that good, but we had to keep looking for something we could live with.
Nearby green space was a major piece of our puzzle, but it was hard to come by. I kept searching the edges of our favorite city parks, but there was nothing else even remotely affordable near Schenley or Frick Park. Riverview Park, in the North Side, looked more promising and we spent quite a while combing through various listings in the area. Some sounded good on paper, but weren't quite as great when we saw them in person.
One day a new property showed up, seemingly out of thin air, although we later learned that it had been on the market for months. (In retrospect, many things about this process have seemed borderline miraculous.) According to the listing, the house sounded very, very small: one bedroom, and it was somewhat unclear whether there was a basement or even a kitchen involved. Still, it was well within our price range, close to the park, and situated on over an acre of land. We had to go look, and then after we looked we had to buy it.
There was a lot of temporary panic, finger crossing, and breath holding involving various complications (potentially illegal and incredibly expensive septic system issues, sudden hesitance on the part of the seller to set a firm closing date, and so on), but we were finally able to resolve all those problems satisfactorily and close on the place two days ago. It needs a great deal of work, but we think that's one reason we were able to find such an amazing deal. The house is much bigger than it looks on paper, including sufficient bedroom and work space for four of us to grow into. The land itself slopes significantly, but has plenty of flat spaces for gardening and play, and lots of potential for exploration (we can't wait to see it in the spring). It's a bit out of the way for most of Pittsburgh, but we do have access to some pretty decent bus routes (and we are currently the owners of a vehicle, which has helped to make this transition possible). Also, we're within a mile or two of several awesome families, a Carnegie Library branch, and of course the park, which has some cool perks like an observatory, non-chlorinated pool, and horseback trails.
This is a long, long post, particularly for a personal topic, but it's hard to contain our excitement now that we are actually moving ahead! Now we just hope to make the space livable and get the move done in the next few weeks, so we can be comfortably ensconced by the time Violet makes her appearance. And, yeah, we really need to sell the building that we're moving out of ASAP, but we're taking one thing at a time and still basking in the honeymoon phase of this particular transition. It's still a little hard to believe that it's real.
Pictures! :)
ReplyDelete