Shade Trees and Other Important Things

Or, Me Ranting and Raving About Matters of Personal Preference

Now that our home is under contract for sale (YAY!), I get to look at “new” homes in the area we’re moving to, in earnest. I had, of course, been looking at them online already, for quite some time. Zillowing is a verb in my vocabulary; it’s a fun pastime while nursing a baby to sleep. I must say I am now pretty good at piecing together a home’s floor plan based on the listing description and photos. It’s kind of like a logic puzzle: match windows from interior and exterior photos, zoom in on distant doorways to peek at the contents of that room, and fill in the gaps with what’s left. Upstairs bedroom arrangements are pretty tricky, though.

Since I have two home purchases under my belt now, I’ve begun to have strong opinions about some things. For example, our next home must have more kitchen counter space than our current home. When we bought this one, we had been planning a kitchen remodel, which would have included adding counter space to a dead wall space in one area, as the big Year Four (or Five) Update Project. Sadly, my kitchen remodel dreams have been squashed again by a premature move. It’s all right, though, it would have been even harder to leave than it is already, if I loved the kitchen here.

Also in the kitchen counter department is the countertop material. I can honestly say I preferred the somewhat hideous 1978 fake wood laminate countertops of our home in Missouri, over the [nice looking, but highly impractical] tile countertops in our house here. Tile is beautiful as a backsplash material! Tile is a pain in the you know what as a countertop material! I can’t get any of my cutting boards to sit flat, unless one corner is hanging off the edge of the counter in just the right spot. We speculated that whoever thought these were a good idea must not have been into cooking much. The one positive of the tile countertops is that you can set eggs in the corners where the grout lines cross, and they for sure will not roll away. However, that’s not worth the uneven cutting board situation. But tile countertops can be replaced more easily than extra counter space can be added.

I am definitely looking for a house with shade trees. Both our houses so far happened to have shade trees, and I’ve now decided they’re indispensable. Shade on at least part of the yard means I can actually enjoy being outside with my kids when it’s kind of hot. Or I can park the outside-loving baby, sunscreen-free, in her stroller in the shade while the big kids play. Or I can enjoy natural lighting through my windows without direct sunlight glaring in and heating up certain areas inside my home. The shade over the roof, when there is some—which there is, here—keeps the house cooler, allowing the AC to keep the interior temperature at what we set it to. When it was 105 (before heat index) this past weekend, the thermostat assured us that it was, indeed, still 72 degrees on the bedroom side of the house. That level of comfort is important to me (even if not quite so much this year as it was last year); therefore, shade trees are important to me.

Trees also facilitate entertainment for the children in the form of bird- and squirrel-watching, seed- and nut-gathering, and maybe some bug-catching. They soak up water, which helps to avert drainage problems in the yard. And, in my opinion, they significantly increase curb appeal.* 

*when kept up nicely. Trees do require a moderate level of maintenance/expense: they must be trimmed every few years to clear potentially dangerous dead branches, raise the canopies, and keep them healthy and looking nice; they also seasonally drop leaves, and during storms twigs and branches, that need to be disposed of; and sometimes they prevent grass from growing because they steal all the sunlight. But…that’s all worth it, to me, in exchange for the above cited benefits. Are trees “worth it,” to you?

So, for our next home, I’m looking for a shady yard, OR a house lower in our budget so that we can spend money upfront to bring in some halfway mature trees. I look at listings of homes in neighborhoods that were built 15-20 years ago, and can’t help but wonder why no one for 14 houses in a row has planted a single backyard tree. Many of them have the token curb appeal tree in the front yard. Some have zero on the whole property. I’m so bewildered by this.

Speaking of curb appeal, I’ve been picky about facades since our first home purchase. If the windows on the second floor above the garage aren’t centered in alignment with where the garage doors are centered, I’m out. This time around I already have theoretical plans for the exteriors of a couple of the online listings that look promising, to paint the non-brick part white and the trim black. We’ll see what we end up with! I strongly feel that the shape of the facade can’t be fixed, and will forever affect the resale value of the home (which is clearly a reasonable concern for me who has not yet stayed in the same home for more than two years since I was in high school). And I’ll forever be unhappy about inviting friends and family over and having that be their first impression of my home. So, I’m a teensy bit vain in that area, I guess. But really, a house costs a lot of money. I think it’s all right to have some personal standards about what to spend that amount of money on.

A lot of interior details can be changed, of course. A “garden tub” that’s not even deep enough for one person to soak comfortably…just, Why? A lack of a built-in microwave. A kitchen sink with separate handles for hot and cold water, or with a shallow basin. Flooring in bad shape. Outdated light fixtures. (Picking new light fixtures was my favorite project we did in our Missouri house. I so wish we’d done it two weeks after moving in, instead of two weeks before selling! It was such a simple fix to bring both interior and exterior from drab to sparkly.)

Floorplan, on the other hand, can’t easily be changed, if, like us, you plan to inhabit the house in question. If you have a house-flipping business and you physically live elsewhere, then, Sure! Gut it and start over! But we don’t: we have three small kids and a day job (well, Justin has a day job. I have an unpaid 24/7 job, what with the childcare and housekeeping…“homemaking,” if you will. 😉) Like, extra bedrooms tend to have to be built in. We’re looking for 4 this time. Both the other times, we were only looking for 3, as our children fit easily in 2 of them, but we ended up with 4, and now we’re hooked.

The fourth bedroom has always been for us The Playroom: where all the toys belong so that the bedrooms are reserved for sleeping (not that toys aren’t played with there, but that they don’t belong there when “put away”); where I can shut the door on the mess and my guests are none the wiser (unless the guests have children and the children all go to play in The Playroom, but I suspect such guests would understand the mess); and where we can clear a spot for the air mattress when someone comes to visit from out of town, without much interrupting the flow of the rest of the house, and affording said visitor some privacy. I don’t know that we’ll ever have a dedicated Guest Bedroom, because while all our family is from out of town, we usually don’t have overnight visitors, so that doesn’t seem like an ideal use of space for everyday life for us.

Now, in both homes so far, we have utilized the second living area or the formal dining room as our TV room. We have this nice, big TV, which Justin bought while we were engaged, because he knew I would not agree to such a purchase once I officially had a say in the finances. Ha! I don’t mind it. He was very financially prudent before we met, and has continued to be so, such that I’m quite comfortable as a homemaker without my own “day job,” plus I happen to like watching movies at home on a big ol’ screen. This turned out to be a win-win situation. Anyway, after having lived in two homes where we could separate The Living Room (for socializing with guests, for socializing as a family, for long book reading sessions on the couch, for being the one non-kitchen room I really like to have tidied up at the end of every day) from The TV Room (for watching movies and TV as the main activity, or as a background activity to adult conversation after the kids are in bed, and as the only room besides the kitchen/table that children are occasionally allowed, by special permission, to picnic with dinner or popcorn on a blanket on the floor)—we would prefer not to go back to having the TV in The Living Room. So, we’re looking for a house with two living areas, or two dining areas, or a “game room” in addition to the 4 bedrooms we want, or some combo of these, so that we can designate one of them as The TV Room.

I feel like I’m rambling now…

But there’s one last thing that wasn’t a dealbreaker before, but is now, based on experience: Just say No to high-traffic roads. This includes roads whose posted speed limit is only 25mph, if it’s a cut-through street between bigger major roads, or the main street into a neighborhood. Our Missouri house was on one of these cut-through streets. We had a fenced backyard, so the kids did have a place to play safely without Helicopter Mom level vigilance from me…but people absolutely never spent time in their front yards, because you couldn’t chat in the street, because cars passed sooo frequently, and often faster than legal—meaning the only neighbors I knew were my immediately-next-door neighbors, whom I only ever talked to from the backyard, and my right-across-the-street neighbor, whom I asked for a cup of vegetable oil once in exchange for two of the cupcakes I’d begun making during the kids’ naptime without verifying my pantry’s inventory first. It was fine—and the house itself was great!—but it certainly wasn’t ideal. In our current home, we live on a very quiet, interior neighborhood street: the only reason you drive on it is if you live on it, or you’re visiting someone who lives on it. And I love it. Everyone is out on nice weather weekends, and I can let the kids get the mail by themselves. Hence, on the Huge Pros, and borderline Deal Breakers list for the next house, can be found: “not on a major road.”

Is anyone still reading? This turned out much longer than I meant it to. Mostly I wanted to talk about the trees, but here we are.

Only two more days till I get to actually go to Houston to look for my next home! House shopping is stressful, yes, but also SO FUN. For me.

What about you? Do you enjoy house shopping? What are some of the highest priorities on your checklist?