The wife and I have been playing around with all of our different options for a few years now. We know that we need more space to grow our family, however, the options are near endless. We've bounced back and forth between building new, expanding or moving to a new house. Due to the age or our house (1920's Bungalow) we felt the maintenance in the end wouldn't improve much over what we have now. So we've removed that option from the table.
Moving to a new home has it's appeals and it negatives. The Houston housing market doesn't seem to have be hit by the recent economic issues at all. Houses are holding their prices and it seems that building has reduced but not significantly enough. We've played around with the idea of moving out to the suburbs, but since we both work on opposite ends of Houston, this becomes less appealing. Looking around in the loop, houses are nice, but in my opinion are really overpriced. Much of this has to do with the fact you can't find a 5000 sq. ft. lot in a decent neighborhood for much less than $250,000.
We've looked around at a few places and as well as a lot of looking on HAR.com. We never find something that impresses us enough to consider dropping the kind of money folks are asking. Hence, after a few years of "discussing" back and forth with the wife, we've setting on going down the path of moving our current home, and building in it's place.
It's a hard decision to make to move our 1920's bungalow from the neighborhood that it has lived in for around 90 years. We live in the rapidly growing Rice Military (or off of Washington as more people my be aware). There are still a lot of old homes in the area, but it quickly being taken over by townhomes and custom homes. There are a fair share of quality constructed townhomes, but also a fair share of crap. We have confidence the neighborhood will continue to grow for at least the next 5-10 years. A lot of which will have to do with the success of the Washington corridor, which some argue is a repeat of the Richmond corridor of 10 or 15 years ago. In the past 3-5 years the Washington seen has exploded with upscale bars and restaurants, luckily we're far enough away to not hear the crowds, music or parking overflow, but close enough that we can walk to most of the bars in close to Shepperd.
Our local elementary school is Memorial Elementary, which is not at the top in HISD, but is above average as listed at GreatSchools.org and in a really nice area right next to Memorial Park. One great thing about HISD is the Magnet Programs. We have every intention of trying to get our kids into either the Vanguard program or the Bilingual Magnet program offered by HISD. The Vanguard is really competitive, so we're not as much worried about getting into those as we would like the Bilingual option.
So now that brings us to today. I'll make a new post with the research we've done on build so far. Stay tuned...
No comments:
Post a Comment