Dream House

Jesse and I have been looking at apartments to move to lately. We currently live in a short term lease efficiency apartment and have to move to a different one every three months if we don't want rent to go up $70. We need a place that allows pets and we would like a one bedroom that has washer and dryer in it. While we have been searching for apartments, we have also been looking at houses. We aren't looking at them seriously, we just want to start getting an idea of the going rate for a house in the area since one day soon we will want to buy our own.

We have come across many that from the looks of the outside and pictures posted online are much to our liking and so far out of our price range. They cost even more than what we were hoping to spend once we do have the money for it. Looks like we will have to either adjust our requirements or our pocketbook.

One night while driving around town we ended up outside of Ames and stumbled upon a very lovely house for sale. It was decent sized from the looks of it, had a great big yard, and we decided the perfect location. We could only see the front of the house and guessed it was only the one story and three bedrooms, which is more than we would need but we loved the place. It is for sale and Jesse actually said if it is $200,000 then I'm going to start dealing the price and we are going to find money for this place. Boy were we wrong! Not only was it over $800,000 it was also 5 bedrooms and had basically two kitchens! Okay, it is MUCH larger than we need or even want. Feel free to check out the link, the place is massive!
http://ames.hunzikerrealty.com/properties/dspProperty.cfm?propertyID=245516

After all this Jesse and I realized what we really do want in a house someday. I always knew that I wanted some piece of grass to call our own, and didn't really want to buy a place that is an apartment and has no lawn of its own. We both have decided that we want a place outside of town. We can get the feel of being in the secluded country, yet be so close to work and everything that a city has to offer. The ideal location would be similar to where this house was located. It is maybe a mile out of town and on a paved road, but the nice thing is that it seems like a rarely traveled paved road. The house would be tucked in a bit so it can't really be seen too well by the road or vice versa. Our dream house would have a large yard and a lovely deck or patio on the back side. Jesse and I have came to the conclusion that the reason we want this type of location is because it would be similar to how we both grew up on farms yet be close to a big town (city of our location, yet to be determined).

Of course there a plenty of other features I can list off that I would love to have in the house, but for now I think that the location will be the most important part to us. My dream is that someday we can have the house of our dreams in the perfect spot, own a piece of land, and even design the entire house. Knowing all the features we want on the inside and out, it will be many years before we will even be able to begin thinking about designing our own house seriously. For now we need to keep dreaming and saving. We need to sit down and discuss if building/designing is just a dream that we want to leave as a dream or a dream that we want to scrimp and save and make into a reality.