![]() “I whimper a little each time,” she said of the four-bedroom Craftsman-style house. Rebecca Foxon, 40, an artist in Manchester, N.H., occasionally drives past the house she didn’t buy three years ago, just to torment herself. “The more you think about it, you begin to idealize it in your mind and you begin to believe that space was actually better than it was.”īut letting go is not easy, particularly if you are still searching for your perfect house. “It wasn’t meant to be, but sometimes you look back on it and think: Why wasn’t that the one?” she said. As the years pass, your memory softens, and you remember a charmer, not a dud.Įlizabeth Kee, an associate broker for CORE real estate, encounters many buyers who suffer from unrequited house love, but she’s sure our minds can play tricks on us. Just as you return to thoughts of the college boyfriend you broke up with senior year, you wonder about the residential path not taken. Years pass, life goes on, but that other home lingers like an unanswered question. Or maybe you swung by an open house on a lark, and dwelt ever after on the beauty you encountered by happenstance. Maybe you were outbid on a Classic Six on the Upper West Side and never found its equal. It is not uncommon to have a home that occupies an outsize place in your memory. In this house, the Viking stove (it must have been a Viking, and not some lesser brand) was never splattered with tomato sauce. While my actual house needed to be cleaned and updated, with an endless list of mundane repairs, the Cliff House was forever untainted by the drudgery of real life. To me, the Cliff House was the house that got away. “A deathtrap, definitely.”ĭeath trap! That really seemed beside the point. “Turnkey, maybe,” my husband said, barely glancing at it. “That one wouldn’t have needed its floors refinished,” I said as we flew past. We came upon the Cliff House again about a year later, as we drove through the winding roads that surround our neighborhood on a sunny afternoon. But owning it did not stop me from dreaming about its one-time rival. It’s a solid house on a flat lot, the kind a responsible person would buy. (Good bones because the flesh needed a paint job.) But had he seen the kitchen? New granite countertops! Stainless-steel appliances! I loved that place long after we bought a perfectly sensible house with good bones. And what would happen in heavy rain?ĭetails. Each one, my husband estimated, would cost a bundle should it ever need repair. And the front yard, if you could even call it a yard, was a series of terraced retaining walls. The grassy back lawn sat about five feet above a sheer drop to a stone patio with no fence to keep someone, like, say, our toddler, from teetering over the edge. The house was perched on a cliff, a location my husband instantly saw as a deal breaker. The en-suite bathroom was freshly renovated with a soaking tub and shiny tiles. I still remember the master suite, tucked on the top floor, away from the other bedrooms. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |