Reply #4: Originally he agreed to rent to us for one year and then we would think about buying it [View All]

About a week later we found out he was talking about selling the house to someone else. Now we know why he didn't want us to wait for a year before committing to buying it. When we decided to move we almost sold our house to get the down payment to buy this one. Thankfully for us the guy who talked to us about buying our old house had a financial set-back and wanted to delay the deal he offered us for a year.

Besides, by this time next year we'll know our way around enough and we will have figured out if we want to stay in this particular area or not. A couple of our friends have suggested other areas that we may like better. Coming from our laid-back home town and old Victorian house with a front porch (with the wooden swing) in a neighborhood with lots of other middle-aged hippies with front porches it has been a culture shock for us to be in the middle of backyard deck land.

We have a couple of friends back home who have houses out here that they are thinking about selling. One of them has a house in Bethesda and another one has several properties in the Crystal City area that he's thinking about selling now that he retired and moved back home to the Lawrence (KS) area.

This is a nice area but I miss being able to bop over to an organic food store or bumping into other liberals on the street. It's just weird. We've met some really nice people who describe themselves as progressive but, this is hard to explain, I'm used to people who are not only self-described progressives (and more often liberal) but who live it. There are just a few too many progressives I've run into out here who couldn't tell me where the local organic markets were or where the political happenings are. I guess I'm used to being part of a more active community. I'm sure there are some around here but I just haven't been able to hook up with them yet. We really need to get out more. I think I've spent way too much time waiting for someone to come by and fix something and less time exploring what's here. Hopefully that will change as time goes by.

Sometimes it feels like I left a bubble of blue sanity and landed in the middle of Pleasant Valley Sunday. I still have trouble spotting our house from a distance because it looks like every other house on the block. I'm used to a neighborhood where there is a variety of architecture and where you can use landmarks like "three houses south from the purple house" or "next door to the house with the lawn art". I swear I don't know the addresses of most our friends back home. I know how to get to their houses by their own unique character (Donna lives in the salmon colored house across the street from the aquamarine house with green and magenta highlights, Marty's house is the one with tin roof, rose bushes and white picket fence that's up the street from the old co-op while Mark lives in the old Blue Moon commune in the red house across the road from the stone barn house -otherwise known as Bob's old house) rather than an actual physical address. That's what I get for living in the community that I grew up in. I'm not used to moving to a whole new area with a different pace of lifestyle.