Balancing need and want while looking for a new place to live.

Now that April is upon me and mine, and the work hours are finally starting to get closer to full time, the concept of moving to a place of our own doesn't seem so impossibly far off as to not be conceivable. Along with that realization, I find myself comparing the places I browse on Craig's List and occassionally acutally visit to where we are now.

The share we currently have isn't the worst place I've lived by far. The house itself I don't find to be anything overly special, but the location is quite lovely. The funny thing is that the owner of the house made a comment to me today about how he'd love to take the house with him if he could when he moves to Florida.

Personally, I'd love to have a property very much like what we have here (want). The only thing missing is a nice small pond. So far, most of what we've seen advertised within the range we will soon be able to afford more readily isn't like here at all. Some of it probably used to be, but then they went and cleared out all the woods and wrecked it. (In my opinion, anyway.) So you have these largish plots of land that look naked save the lone house plunked on it somewhere. Sometimes they've done some token landscaping, but it's not the lush woodsy feel that we have here by far.

I realize that the smarter thing to do (need) is just find a decent sized place at a price we can afford for a year and just save like mad while we pay down the debt we have. One year is such a short time in the big picture, and later on down the road, a place more like what I love about here may open up.

On the other hand, I do hope that something a little more akin to what we're searching for does suddenly show itself--it doens't even have to have a pond. So every day I duitifully do my check of what's available in the areas that make sense, and hope.

The other sticking point I've had lately is the size of the places that we're looking at (need and want). Currently, we have most of our stuff stashed in a storage space. This has been very counterproductive to continuing certain pre-planning business attempts I was making before the move (comics in particular). But even though the house within which we are living is quite spacious, we are mostly relegated to two small rooms (our queen sized bed barely fits with meager walking room in the one), which is why so much is in storage. Some of the nicer sized properties for rent are rich in land size, but small in living space, others are a goodly sized living space, but if you trip going out the front door, your head hits the street. I find the large gap of medium sized lot and living space telling and confusing all at the same time. I know some people are still clinging to boom pricing, and the newer properties we look at are definitely built with the boom times in mind, but the dearth of medium/medium, even in properties not for rent or sale, is a curious thing to me.

Here, we originally were supposed to have enough room set aside for us that we could get a very small storage space which wouldn't make the rent that much more costly in the long run. Instead, give when space we do have, the storage costs have made this place quite costly.

So as the month trudges on, and the money is stashed, it will be interesting to see if that elusive medium/medium shows up. If not, there will be much weighing of which end of the spectrum we're willing to cope with for a year. The balance of which, of course, will also be weighed by how much extra we might have to pay for continued storage for whatever won't fit in a four room cottage style home. It's part of what's driving me crazy now.