We spent today touring the local area to look at property. Our indecision on where we’re going to live long term continues, but the area we’re living in at the moment (Olympia) has much to recommend it. So we spent the day meandering and seeing what we could see that fit into our price range and how close we can get to the trifecta of location, price and features. Mind you, our trifecta is somewhat different to other peoples.
Olympia certainly offers us the most that we’ve seen in terms of what we can afford. Amusingly, someone suggested to me that we should look at Steamboat Island (google maps). Which is a place Kathryn visited for semi-work reasons recently. We saw some gorgeous property out there, then ran into a chap who’s selling his own 1.6 acre plot (of which a big chunk you can’t build on for many reasons). An English chap, funnily enough.
We took his card and I got over excited about the potential of this land. It does have quite a few significant challenges, and is sloping in a way that means we have to consider whether it would or could be prone to landslides. Which means much discussion with a civil engineer and, I suspect, super-complex groundworks. Which may price it out of our budget.
There’s another property, though, which we are trying to arrange looking at, that’s near to the over-exciting one and which (assuming it doesn’t consist entirely of marsh, which seems to a common thing around here) would be much easier. It’s more expensive, but offers more of the things we want, but takes away the ocean view we’d actually get from the first one.
It is literally the only time we’ve looked at a lot with ocean view and said ‘hey, we could afford that’. Whether we actually can afford it is another question, because we’d need some kind of mortgage to be able to build on it and it’s not big enough that we could sell off a chunk of the land to finance anything. Nor could we build what’s called an ‘additional dwelling unit’ to rent out, which we’d though about doing. So it’s tricky.
Anyhow, then we went and looked at in-town properties. It’s kind of hard to get deeply excited about a city-lot with a quite nice or flipable house, when what you really want is a nice bit of land away from all the peoples. But there were some possibilities in areas that are not horrendous that fit into our price bracket.
So yes, it was pretty positive.
