Do you live in your 'Dream Home' or a 'Biding your Time' home? (pics to share too?)

[Tamika]

Is the house you're in "The One" that you adore? Or are you looking and biding your time til you find that special one?

We are lucky that we live in as close to our dream come true as possible. We have a log house that could only be made better if it had a loft and main floor laundry! Oh, and a linen closet too! LOL Other than that I couldn't ask for more. It is on a beautiful 5 acre parcel, as private as you can get on only 5 acres, large enough for our family to sleep, play, eat and commune together in.

It is older, so it does need some work - we just finished putting a forest green metal roof on, and I'm slowly adding some decorating touches in addition to the fact that next up is a new kitchen and bathroom cabinetry scheme....

But, I do have to say I'm lucky to have as close to a dream come true as we can afford.

Here is just two pics that show our family room.

[Tamika]

and yes - that is Kaylyn 'hiding' on the couch in the first picture! :D

[SarahJ]

Our house is pretty close to the dreamiest house we can afford at the moment!!
Its our first home and we didn't really have to settle for anything less than what we wanted, so we feel really lucky.
Its four bedrooms, almost fully redecorated inside and has a great outdoor entertainment area.
We're gutting and re-doing the bathroom in the next couple of months, but apart from that its all cosmetic, nothing major.
We plan to be here for at least 5 years, we've especially been enjoying it this summer!

First pic is our house and outdoor area, seen from the edge of the deck.

Second is the kitchen, one of my favourite rooms - it flows into the dining, making it handy for having guests over. We now have bar stools at the breakfast bar.

Third - our bedroom. None of the furniture is ours, these are the real estate pics from last year. I've also put new tea coloured curtains in our room.

[Christine]

You guys both have beautiful homes!

Well, we did have to settle when we bought our first home because we were buying it on the coattails of a bankruptcy. But it's FAR better than we ever expected to have on our first run through. It's a nice home and serves our purposes now, but it won't last too much longer. For one, there's only one bathroom and that just won't fly with four girls approaching their teenage years!

We're currently remodeling the entire house, one room at a time and working towards our ultimate goal of building our dream home. We have it all worked out in a step-by-step plan. God has blessed us enormously in the past few weeks and it looks like we'll be able to start building in the next five years!!

Of course I keep teasing Dave that we're going to make this house so beautiful on the inside I won't want to move!

We're remodeling the living room and dining room (one large room) currently and starting the kitchen in the next few weeks. The soffits will be replaced with our tax money and next year's return will go to the roof and/or bathroom. Then the rest is cosmetic. :D

[Lori]

Those are gorgeous houses!

We're renting right now, and it's definitely not our "dream home." ;) Eventually we think we'd like to get a two-family home with my ILs, but that's a while off.

[Kristi]

Tamika and Sarah I am so jealous. What beautiful homes you have. :D I am moving in with one of you. :giggle

Ours is okay. Not really our dream home. I would like something a bit bigger and nicer but it works for now. It is all we can really afford. There are some renovations we would love to do if we ever got the time and the money. But if we do decide to stay here in the Va. area after this tour for tim (3 years) we will probably move to a bigger home depending on how our money situation is then.

[Beka]

at the risk of sounding like the downer here I live in a crappy tiny 2 bed rental in an estate which is pretty much the ghetto in my town (my parents won't walk around here, my sister won't visit here, my neighbour regularly smashes his own windows and tries to kill himself in the street, my neighbours car was stolen from outside my bedroom window, i can't leave my first floor windows open at night.... you get the picture!) but... it is CHEAP!!!!!

It's owned by a charitable trust which offers low cost housing which is good because if it wasn't we couldn't even afford to rent!

am i bidding my time- time is about all we have right now :lmao property is stupid price in england (a 4 bedroom house in our town costs roughly 30 times what david earns in a year- mortgage companies will lend 5 times annual income only)

[Lori]

at the risk of sounding like the downer here I live in a crappy tiny 2 bed rental in an estate which is pretty much the ghetto in my town (my parents won't walk around here, my sister won't visit here, my neighbour regularly smashes his own windows and tries to kill himself in the street, my neighbours car was stolen from outside my bedroom window, i can't leave my first floor windows open at night.... you get the picture!) but... it is CHEAP!!!!!

If it makes you feel any better, we've had people robbed at gunpoint during the day right outside our apartment (we were inside but didn't see or hear anything at the time) twice in the last year, and our apartment isn't that cheap! We pay $750/month, which doesn't include any utilities.

I'd be less negative about where we live if the crimes were mainly property crimes and not gun crimes. It would suck to have our car stolen, but that's not a risk that's a deal-breaker for me, but gun crime absolutely is. That's probably the #1 reason we want to move. Actual shootings are extremely rare in our neighborhood (there hasn't been one in years), but robberies involving guns aren't, and there's just way too much risk there.

[Beka]

oh no Lori i can top that- i had a man stabbed in the head on my driveway last year (think i wrote about it at the time as i was so :eek at it happening...)- woke up at 1am to find police search lights all over our house :eek and an armed response unit in the street, opened my door to find an armed police officer (they are not routinely armed in england) on my front door step - now that has to have been a doozy as far as living here goes, we have alot of stabbings but gun crime in England at the moment is more focused in cities and we're city overspill (although David has been threatened twice so far... not sure if he's just unlucky or always the stupid onlooker who steps in and says "hey we don't need this lets calm down" ... he worries me!) should add man stabbed in the head did live (and the man who stabbed him only served 9 out of an 18 month sentence and was then rehoused in our street)

I pay £300 a month which is probably around $550 right? (no utilities in that and then we have to pay around $250 a month "council tax" for living in the house as well) compared to other rents it's fabulous! One very nice thing i have to say is being such a dodgy area the school is lovely as it really does try and turn things around for kids living in bad conditions and gives them a really positive outlook, also you get very little one up manship around here, no keeping up with the joneses as such which is nice!

You sound very much like me- i slept through a drugs raid on the apartment block opposite our house and apparently they were leaping off balconey's and set fire to the block- me i slept through it all (much to David's amusement)

Anyway i don't know about you but i am drooling over Sarah's pool picture and wondering how far my property $$$ would stretch in NZ! :giggle

[Kristen]

K, Sarah! I'm moving to NZ! :giggle

Ours is a biding-our-time. We're fixing it up, and hopefully we can sell it in a year or two and move to Charlotte, where we'll be able to buy a nice house with a very small mortgage.

[Shiloh]

Sarah, I love your house. I am enamored with that sleek, modern kitchen (I love the table and chairs, too, but I guess those aren't yours). Tamika, your home looks very cozy and inviting.

I like our house, and I think we're very lucky to have what we have at our age, but I do dream of something totally different. Something new and shiny and modern, something without a pink and powder blue bathroom...

[Polly]

Not my dream home. I live in a nice townhouse (hey-I bought it from a friend) and I not complaining. However, CJ are starting to look for an affordable single family home in the DC metro area. :lmao Yeah, that will happen. In the meantime, I know that the next home might not be the permanment home either. We probably won't be able to do that untill I go back to paid work. I guess we'll end up like my parents-it took 3 homes until they found the one they wanted to stay in.

Polly

[Jenny]

Definately NOT our dream home!!! BUt..its in the area we want to live and everything around it is great, plus we are a two minute walk from school.

I just don't like the 32 yr old typical split level, half-reno'd LOL

[SarahJ]

Jenny our house is 32 years old as well, but luckily the style (brick and tile) hasn't really aged badly. As our builder said, its got good bones!

Shiloh - funnily enough we bought a very similar table and chairs to the ones in the photo, but our table is bigger and sturdier, and the chairs are taupe micro-suede and not fake leather :)

[Jenny]

uhm..I would rather have your 32yr old home any day over mine ;) Especially in NZ LOL

Hmm...I should revisit that move down under again with hubby ;)

[Shana]

Sarah, that is just a lovely home. Really, fits into my head as what I would consider *my* dream home.

Okay so we live in a nice 2 bedroom apartment but no, it's NOT my dream home :)

I basically am starting life over, and Brian and I are looking to buy our 1st (and most definitely NOT dream) home next summer (08).

[wendygrace]

We live in our first home together and I love the house layout and the neighborhood however it seriously needs a lot of work. We need new floors and paint on the walls. I would have also liked a lot more land. We are happy for now and expect to be hear another five years or so and when its dh's time to move on up at work, we're hoping to move out of state. However, not sure if we'll ever buy again. Its just too much work for my unhandy dh and me. If we do get a house, we want to live significantly below our means so we can pay someone to come do the repairs that a normal house needs.

[Beryl]

I think my expectations were lower than most. My folks did not buy a house until I was in college... I was raised in rentals, ALL kinds, mostly in pretty bad shape. I definitely dreamed of more, but I wasn't dreaming of pools. Just a situation where the repairs I make add to my own equity. It's a humble dream, but not one everyone gets to take for granted.

But the dream house I concocted in undergrad was having one of the great old bungalows in the neighborhood just off campus. Something with character, something you could see the off-beat professor living in with too many books, full of knick-knacks and a lovely garden.

Someone got that memo. When my husband found this house, we were done. It's 70 year old Tudor bungalow in an off-campus neighborhood full of profs and off-beat types, cracking plaster, very creaky floors, drafty windows, damp basement, large yard... but it was an affordable single family house in the DC area and there is nothing here I can't handle. It's in a fantabulous neighborhood with good schools close by. We have a LONG list of things to do, like A/C and new windows, add a bathroom and finish the basement... but we intend to live here for a while, so we'll just take our time.

[Mary]

Our current house is a "biding our time" home but it's way nicer than we had any right to expect. We lost our last house because of financial difficulties and we had to lease. We stumbled upon this house for lease; it's probably one of the bigger rental homes in town. It's 2600 sq. feet, 3 bdr. and 2 bath. We just had a bankruptcy a year ago but we have started the process to buy this house and dh has actually been approved! I can't believe it's going to happen so soon after the bankruptcy. I thought it would be four or five years before we'd be homeowners again. Anyway, our plan is to go ahead and make the purchase and stay here two or three years, making some improvements and repairing our credit even more, and then we will look for something bigger and better.

We won't have any problems making do here for that much longer. Madalyn and the baby will have to share a room but the room is HUGE so it's no biggie. It's a nice house and I like the neighborhood; it's just not exactly what I want so I'd like to look at other options down the road a bit. Right now I'm really happy with it, though, because with all the junk we went through it's really a surprise we ended up somewhere so decent.

[Jejune]

We live in a small two bedroom apartment. 'Nough said. LOL The real estate prices are insane here, so I don't know when we'll be able to buy. The small fixer uppers around the corner from me sold for upwards of $700,000.

[Val]

Biding our time for sure! We rent a 2 bedroom condo, and while it's not as adventerous as Beka's or Lori's it's the same type of situation. Car thefts/break-ins, fights, gun shots, domestic violence like crazy, etc. I'm positive that one day I will have to find the lady downstairs dead as she leaves the doors unlocked and windows open in the summer- I'm not sure if she doesn't realize or what. The guy next door we have to avoid because he's now gone on multiple loud tirades about "mexicans" and "rednecks" and we don't want to be associated with all of that for fear of getting shot.
But things have improved a bit- there was a unit that had these guys (can't remember what gang) with dogs trained to attack the police that got kicked out. Then the family that moved in after that turned out to sell drugs, but they've moved and it's fairly quiet now. All the women who fought have left (Thank God, I don't think I could stand one more incident) But who knows what it will look like by the summer time, it could be worse than ever.

[Lisa]

well we rent so no we aren't living in our dream home. We are hoping though that when we move the next time we will be able to get a mortgage and buy

[giffy]

There's a lot I love about my house - the kitchen is fabulous since we redid it in '05, the neighbourhood is great, and we're on a big block with plenty of room out back for the kids. The house itself, however, is too small. We need an extra bedroom, a study/spare room, a second bathroom and another lving area/rumpus room.

Hopefully we'll be able to extend the house in a few years, because I don't want to move to the types of areas we could afford a house in at this point.

[ColleenC]

Soooo far away from our dreamhome it isn't even funny :lmao

We had to settle last year because Steve is self employed and has bad credit. But We only paid 85k for a 3 bed townhouse in a crappy area of the city. we just sold it for 201K LOL So I don't regret buying it AT ALL.

We are now more than likely having to rent. We can spend up to 309K on a house and your getting a fixer upper. Once I have worked for awhile and his credit gets better(6 mon to a year)then we will look at buying again.

We are still so much better off than we were a year ago though because we still have over 120K to put down on a house and even if we don't buy in the next year or two we will still have that money when the market goes down. Our market jumped almost 40% last year.

[Tamika]

oh man Colleen is that ever true - there is no way on earth that we would even be looking at the house we live in if we were buying now. Guaranteed it would be about 250K out of our range if not more. And that is only 3 years ago that we bought it!

Sarah! I LOVE that modern look too - I have two extremes - I love the clean lines of that stainless/modern look and yet I sooooooo love my homey country feel! :)

[ColleenC]

Trust me I know!! I look at the house prices now and I think HOLY CRAP, I don't even think Tamika paid that much for her acreage and we'd only be getting a 1000 sq ft house. It's insane.

can't wait to win the lottery ;)

[SweetmamaB]

We're in a "bid our time" but we love it! It's an old house (1911) and has some leaded glass windows, which I adore. It's our first home and we got a pretty good deal on it. Also, quite a bit of remodeling had been done. Heath added new insulation, we just bought custom vinyl windows that will be installed in a few weeks, and eventually we hope to remodel the kitchen. This spring/summer we'll be painting the exterior and finish fencing in the backyard. But it definately isn't our dream home. That's still at least 5 to 10 years away!

[Amy J]

we live with my parents so I'm nowhere near a dream home yet. I probably won't be there until I'm 60 years old!