I won’t go into the actual dream because it was admittedly kind of boring, but last night I had one about our dream house … which is admittedly both a dream and a conversation that comes up around here quite a bit.
Even though we’ve only been in the house we own now for about three years, truth be told we’ve always kind of thought of it as a starter house. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a nice house and we happened across it at a pretty good price at a time when we desperately needed to get out of renting, but even only having one kid we’re starting to feel some limitations and it gets rapidly worse when we think about having more! 😯
Worst at this particular moment in time is probably the lack of a backyard, both because it leaves Cleo almost nowhere to run around, but also as Christopher starts to get bigger, it doesn’t give us any room if we wanted to put in a play set or a sandbox or even just chase each other around the yard! And yeah, the pool is nice … though its position behind the house keeps it too cold to swim more often than I like … and I don’t think from here on out I’d have a house in Florida without a pool, but it’s hard to deny the HUGE chunk of backyard real estate that the thing takes up…
I think that’s probably our biggest draw at this point, in simply finding a place that has a decent amount of property attached to it, which is also a bit of a challenge in an area that’s predominantly subdivisions with predetermined lots. At this point I’m not entirely opposed to living out in the country, but it’s going to have to be the right chunk of land to really sell it … and it doesn’t help that every time we go to the beach, I still come home and look at real estate prices to see if there’s some magical beachfront gem out there that has gone undiscovered! 😉
We actually thought we found one of these a month ago, but it turned out the reason why the land was undeveloped was because it was mostly conservation area and COULDN’T BE BUILT ON, so … oops.
As for the house itself, we’ve pretty much settled on knowing that we’re going to have to build to get what we really want because with it being the dream house that we want to spend the rest of our lives in, at this stage we can’t really bring it on ourselves to settle! Granted, we’re probably still several years out from being able to really take action on anything, but it’s still fun to think about all of the options and having something built to our exact specifications, every nook and cranny … and game room!
So if anybody has a couple of acres of prime waterfront real estate in the Tampa Bay area that they want to unload cheap, do drop me a line so that we can get this dog and baby a proper backyard, and more importantly get started on my own personal arcade… 😛