Catching Up -- Househunting in Massachusetts

As I continue on my blog catch-up project, I'm moving to the week after Daniel and Meghan came to visit ... we scheduled a 4 day weekend (woo hoo! Homer would be happy for us!) to head up to Massachusetts and start househunting. I already had Monday off for Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday and the bank graciously allowed me to take the Friday and Saturday before off as well. Very sweet.

We left on Friday morning and arrived at the Embassy Suites sometime in the afternoon (same place we stayed in August ... it's so nice there! Little did we know it would soon become our home-away-from-home.) We had just purchased a Garmin GPS to help with the househunting and I had a great time playing with it for six hours while we drove. I should have realized that twisting in my seat to search for all the places we were planning to visit was going to pull muscles in my back, but that would have been too easy. Sigh.

We met Claire (the realtor assigned to us by the relocation company) at her office and off we went! Claire had taken the list of potential properties we had sent her and mapped out two full days of househunting for us. Each day's househunting was nicely bound into a packet with property descriptions and pictures for each house we were visiting. Very efficient. That's our Claire! Since she had a lot better idea where we were going than we did, we put her in the front seat next to the GPS and off we went.

Well, let's just say after 2 full days of looking at just about every townhouse that wasn't designated for "active adults over 55" within a 45 minute commute of Dave's work campus, we had it pretty well narrowed down. We decided we really liked one of the townhouses we saw over in Afra Terrace in West Boylston but knew we weren't crazy about the idea of having to wait 4 months for the builder to start and finish it.

He had another development over in Holden that was really in the beginning stages ... in fact, none of the 5 units that were up were completed. A couple were models, but they still lacked carpeting etc. While we were hesitant to build (or in our case, go with a place that was just framed in ...) in a very undeveloped location (I mean, there are mounds of dirt everywhere and a huge dumpster out front because of the building) we did like what we saw of the area and felt that the layout of the townhouse was just what we were looking for.

So -- we took a deep breath and decided this was it. Within a couple weeks we had put a reservation on it and planned our next trip up to make selections and seal the deal ... here's what would soon become our home sweet home!

And there was a really nice treat waiting for us when we got home ... Thank you Bree!