The Blog of Michael T. Murphy and his lifelong obsession with "little army men" and their imaginary glory, miniature wargaming, and other things...

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

"So we may be moving...."

As the month of May slipped into June, and now June is history; and as July comes before us, my wife and I have been looking for a new place to live.
There are many reasons for this, but essentially it boils down to the three simple facts:

A: The Cost of Living in Indianapolis has risen considerably. We've seen dramatic tax increases each year here.

B: Our neighborhood is turning into a "hood". We've had some pretty sketchy folks move in a few houses down, and the holiday weekends are filled with his biker buddies all coming over to party. All riding their 1970's ear choppers and sporting leather and swastikas. It's like looking at a casting call for extras for the movie "CC Rider".

C: The wife and I want a place that's a little quieter and relaxed. Over the past 30 years I have lived in numerous cities, (Houston, El Paso, Las Vegas, and Indy), and we just want a place where it's quiet, peaceful, and easy for us. A place that allows us to have box gardens and perhaps a small chicken coop for my wife to have a couple of egg laying hens.  You can take the Kansas girl off the farm.....

So we started looking around.
The Indiana housing market (like a lot of areas right now), is explosive hot. Currently as of this writing the hottest housing market in the nation is in Ft. Wayne, Indiana although no one can really explain why.
Houses here in the Indy area are getting offers within days (if not hours) of being put up on listing. The competition is fierce as Indy is expanding and many folks are moving here. Most of these people are from California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois and Ohio, but hey, whose been checking?... ;-)
Naturally as the demand for houses outpaces the supply of current places, prices have been climbing.

We looked at two and immediately decided against one of them.
The other one we made an offer on. It came up on Friday, we saw it and made an offer on Saturday, and on Monday was told we were outbid by 20K. (Six offers in two days).

So we looked some more.
As we peered through Realtor.com and Zillow.com, my wife's eyes suddenly snapped to one.
"Ohhh...this is nice." She said.
So we read about it.
And last week we went to see it.
My wonderful wife (Gawd bless her!) fell in love with it. That was pretty much all it took.
It's a little country farmhouse, approx 120 years old. It's sitting on 1.5 acres of land and is out in a quiet country setting, in a nearby county that is far enough out "in the country" to be "country", but still close enough to towns/cities (4 of them) to make for easy driving.
The amount of money we paid in property taxes on our current residence will cover almost five years there.
So we made an offer on it.
The offer was accepted and well, we are now in the paperwork phase and the "wait" phase for all of the inspections to be done.
Plus...there's a surprise...
"If" we get it...I might get my man cave!!!!
If we get it, pics to follow!

More fun to come!
Wish us luck!

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