Pardon me for a moment while I go off on one of my favorite tangents. Farm houses, and their aesthetically similar suburban counterparts. I’ve talked about this before, so I’ll skip the overly long narrative this time, and just get to the good part. While checking out a few houses in the local Parade of Homes this week, we drove past this beauty. It was most definitely a “Honey, STOP the car!” moment. Isn’t it lovely?
It’s located in a humongous master planned community on the southwest corner of the valley. Nice, but I think I’d take it on country acreage, with a big red barn on the side. Nothing against master planned communities or city planners – I was a fledgling planner myself back in the day. I just like the idea of living away from sprawl and traffic and having space to breath.
Now I've got houses on the brain again. I knew checking out the Parade of Homes would be a BAD idea. Pretty houses are hazardous to my mental health.
I have a problem. Actually, I think it is a genetic predisposition. I suffer from habitual house-hunter-itis (& I’m not talking about the show on HGTV). I am always looking at houses, and not just casually, I like to imagine myself living in them. I will email pictures of my latest find to my husband at work and haul the kids around in our minivan to look at them. It all started when I was a little girl and would spend hours flipping through my architect dad’s stacks of house plan magazines. Eventually I discovered model homes and all the fun of taking the tour. Now it has evolved into searching for real estate online, always looking for the bargain dream home that somehow has been overlooked and would be absolutely perfect. I don’t know why I do this, but I seriously think it has something to do with the fact that my parents were the same way – constantly talking about moving, my dad always drawing up house plans, and yet the big move eluded them until after we were all raised. These days, I’ll be driving somewhere with my kids and I’ll hear a little voice from behind me say, “Look at that pretty house, mom”. The next victims of this consuming disorder are in the back seat, and it is not too late to save them. It is finally time to kick this habit and break the cycle. I will always like looking at houses, but I don’t want to go through life constantly daydreaming about something better, when I already have something great. I like our home, and for now I know this is where we need to be.
And then this delicious little bit of junk-mail arrives. If I could find a beauty house like this with the big front porch and wooded lot, we’d be outta here (I've got a major thing for white farmhouses with the big red barn out back)! You see, I’m hopeless. Sigh.
