Location, Location, Location

Back when Denisa and I were house hunting (over 13 years ago), we had never bought a house before, but we had a few ideas about what we really wanted. Most of those were centered around things like the look of the house and having some property to go with it. The house we ended up choosing was nice in many ways, but one way I wasn’t a big fan of was its location: right on the path to the high school, just a half mile or so away from the main road in the area.

There would be traffic all the time! There would be noise! Light from Wal-Mart in the distance. Lots of things concerned us at the time, but in the end, the price and the other aspects of the house ended up convincing us to turn a blind eye to the location. It wasn’t perfect, but nothing would be, right?

It’s interesting to me, then, to see how in the thirteen years since we bought the house, my perceptions have changed. The house’s location obviously hasn’t, but I now look at that location as one of the biggest assets of the place as opposed to a liability. Yes, we still get traffic in the morning when school is starting and the afternoon when it lets out, but that’s minimal as far as nuisances go.

On the other hand, we’re just a mile away from Wal-Mart and very close to the main road in the area, so we can get around places quite quickly, and our road gets plowed very frequently. We might have to worry about icy roads, but usually it’s a bigger concern about wherever we want to get to, rather than being able to get out of our driveway in the first place. And being so close to the high school and the main road (and the hospital just a mile further) means that when the power goes out, it almost always comes back a few hours later. The longest we’ve had to go without power in the thirteen years we’ve lived here is probably a day. Maybe a bit more once? But nothing that sticks out in my memory. Over that same stretch of time, we’ve had many friends be stuck without power for three days or more, multiple times.

This is in no way meant as a taunt to the people without power right now. We had a snow storm that brought a lot of heavy snow and downed tree limbs on Saturday night, and there are still many people in Maine without power. But every time a storm like that happens, I’m reminded again about how much I thought the location of our house was a problem, and how wrong I really was.

Sometime I guess it’s better to be lucky than smart.

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