Oh Yeah, You Blend

Back in TX after a week in Buffalo looking for a house. And we found one! Waiting for the final paperwork, but it looks like we bought a house (pending inspection and all that other stuff which I knew nothing about a week ago, and about which I now know almost nothing). It’s a four bedroom, two and a half bathroom Colonial with a big yard (can you tell I’ve been reading a lot of real estate listings?) in Snyder (which is an area of Amherst). The neighbourhood is nice – feels city-ish while still being villagey. Very walky. There’s a whole bedroom suite downstairs, plus three bedrooms and a full bath upstairs. We have bathrooms to spare baby!
We had a great realtor named Ed who was like Gary Sinise’s sarcastic brother. Ed was snarky and funny and had been in the real estate business for over 20 years, so he knew a thing or two (and taught us a lot). Ed schlepped us all over the place to different houses (we must have looked at somewhere between 20 and a billion houses), gave us his very diplomatic opinions about everything from neighbourhoods to basements to hockey, and eventually hand-held our nervous selves through the offer-making and counter-offer-making processes. We’d recommend him to anyone, he was wonderful and he made the whole thing a lot more fun and less fraught than it might have been. And I think we love our house! We need to decorate and everything, and we hope to be able to put in a fireplace and a/c in a while (the only thing we didn’t love about this house was that it lacked a fireplace and a/c, but both can be added eventually…it also doesn’t have a basement, which means less storage, but also fewer monsters, so there’s that).

Here’s the back:

Here’s the front room:

(there’s another room to the right of this pic)

Here’s the kitchen (about that wallpaper…):

Here’s the dining room, which has sliding doors to the patio (again…the wallpaper…):

Here’s the back room (which is an extension and also has sliding doors to the patio):

So now we just have to wait for the house to pass inspection, negotiate more about anything the inspector finds, do the lawyery stuff, close, pack up here, arrange moving, move, get everything hooked up and set up and sodicured, and then we’ll be euphonic (as the Scots designer fellows say)!

Things to like about Buffalo: it’s way way WAY cooler and nicer than you’d think if all you ever see of it are the malls and the bits between Niagara Falls and the malls, it’s full of lovely little villagey-feeling areas, the downtown seems cool, there are a ton of parks and neat art deco architecture and Frank Lloyd Wright buildings (Buffalo has more FLW buildings than anywhere except Chicago, plus it also has a lot of Fake Lloyd Wright buildings) and rivers with bike/walking paths and woodsy places; the people seem to be really friendly; there are some amazing restaurants (and not just Buffalo wings either); actual, no-shit, TREES!; it’s small, so you can drive for 5-10 minutes and be somewhere which feels entirely different from where you were before; the Derek Trucks Band was playing at the University at Buffalo while we were there (of course, I didn’t find this out until AFTERWARD), and they apparently love playing there and try to come by whenever they’re touring; the weather is NOT TEXASSIAN which means I can get back to bike riding and walking and being less of a slug; the cost of living is insanely cheap (as Jim says, it’s the affordable suburb of Toronto); Wegman’s, which is apparently the coolest supermarket, like, ever; it’s a bona fide hockey town; there’s Tim Horton’s and Swiss Chalet; that Western New York accent kills me; and Molly and Josh, who we stayed with, were super-nice and made the whole thing a lot more fun than it might have been otherwise. In short, it really does seem to be a very under-rated city and I’m looking forward to living there.

Tags: Buffalo, house, moving

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 20th, 2007 at 10:30 AM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.