Cleveland

We spent last week in Cleveland exploring the area we hope to move to in the next few months. I had been looking forward to moving before, but after visiting, I am really excited. There is so much in that area! Plenty of museums, parks, classes, stores-so many more things to do and see. Within a two hour drive we have tons of daytrip options, and within a day's drive we could get to almost anything except some of our family & friends. It's also beautiful out there. There was a foot of snow on the ground last week and Ian loved stomping around crunching the snow.

There are several options for housing and we're now thinking and praying about what we want to do. Ideally, we'd like to have a "dream house" out there-nice yard, good neighborhood, good school district-eventually for the kids to grow up in. We're not ready for that now, partly financially but mostly we want to get more familiar with the area before deciding exactly where we want to settle. So we're trying to decide what to do for the short term.

We saw one apartment that we liked. It's a 3 bedroom, so Jeremy would have an office and the kids would share a room. The pluses: no maintenance issues, no down payment, no long term commitment, and it's in a good area. Downside: small, no separate playroom for the kids, probably will be loud for Jeremy trying to work, parking is kind of far from the building, and we won't be building equity.

Another option is a 2200 square foot mobile home. The layout is perfect for us-one one side of the house is the master bedroom and beyond that, an office just the right size for Jeremy. There are tons of huge closets, and three bedrooms besides the master, so the kids wouldn't have to share and we'd still have an extra room. There is a separate living room/family room for the kid's toys. There is also a small yard-big enough for the kids to play in a splash pool or kick a small ball. Downside: kind of rural, a good 10 minutes from the highways & shopping. The lot is rented, not owned. It could be hard to resell, since the current owners have had it on the market since last July.

A third option we're looking into is a very cheap mobile home. It's in a better location, closer to the highways. It's still 2200 square feet and has an attached garage and deck. It also has a little yard. And did I mention it's cheap? Like less than our car cheap. We could probably buy a new house in 2-3 years if we lived there. Downside: we haven't seen it in person, we don't know what the layout is exactly, and we're not sure why it's that cheap.

At any rate, it's really nice to know that we have several options out there that would enable us to buy a great house for the kids to grow up in after only 5 years or so. Just have to decide what route to take.