Upstater

Mark and I have started poking around to see what’s out there in terms of houses for sale in the various areas of the Hudson Valley. Obviously our first look around was in Beacon itself. Since we live here, it’s easy to just ride by a house for sale or through a neighborhood on the way home from the grocery store. However, right now I don’t think we’ll end up in Beacon after all. We are pretty unhappy with the lot sizes of most houses around here, and we don’t like that so much of the city either doesn’t have sidewalks, or they disappear. We’ve already had some fairly close calls trying to walk our dogs on the narrow, winding road we live on. So we started poking around to see what else is out there in other parts of the Hudson Valley, while asking ourself “Can we live here?”

Via: (1) Upstater (2) HGTV (3)About.com (4) Trulia (5) Houzz.com (6) Martha Stewart

Our “dream home” would look something like any one of the photos above. The terms cottage, bungalow, craftsman, farmhouse, or Cape Code, all come to mind when describing it. Not very original, I know. We and a bajillion other people would LOVE to live in such a home. Unfortunately, we don’t know of any huge bungalow areas in the Hudson Valley like you’d find in Chicago, Pasadena CA or even in “The Heights” area of Houston TX.

Luckily, Mark and I are on the same page about where we’d like to live. We don’t want to live in the suburbs, or anything resembling them. We either want to be ‘in town’ in a city, hamlet or town that has a walkable downtown. Or we want some privacy.  I don’t want to say rural, per se.  But we don’t want to live in a suburban neighborhood or any place that resembles one.  The only thing that would allow for a detour away from a place like I’ve described here is a home on the water. That “water” can be a river, creek, lake or pond.

The other thing we’re thinking about is the possibility of buying a home that will need some work. We are not interested in renovating the home ourselves. Nope. But we are thinking of the possibility of purchasing something and getting it renovated before we move in.

Too many marathon viewings of The Property Brothers and Love It or List It (go Hillary!) have probably skewed our perspective of how hard or easy this will be. But…we both like the charm of an older home. Now if only we can convince HGTV to bring one of those shows south of the border from Canada into the Hudson Valley…we’d be all set.

Older homes tend to come in two versions up here – already updated with a hefty price tag, or in serious need of updating. So we figured we might just take some inspiration from HGTV and get the home we really want.

So the bad news is, we don’t know where we want to buy a home yet. The good news for anyone wanting to find out more about the various areas of the Hudson Valley but don’t live here yet, you’ll be able to read along with us as we explore the many cities, towns and hamlets that make up “The Hudson Valley” to figure out whether or not it is the place of us. 🙂