Finding our place

Once we decided that we were going to move to the country, we started looking on line in areas with forest.  It may be a bit crazy to base decisions on how big the trees are...but we wanted mature trees and something pretty to look at.  Our house in Dallas County, was in a new subdivision...I think they knocked all the trees down to build the houses and then planted one tree in the front yard as part of the "landscaping package".  Our yard was pretty barren until we planted more trees, bushes and flowers.  We made it look nice, I am getting to old to be doing that much work any more.  The trees we planted were small, all the trees were small, except on the golf coarse walking trail.  I guess I should say, in the beginning we looked in Arkansas, then Oklahoma, then even Louisiana...mostly because of available employment opportunities and my husbands job interviews.  But, the more we drove through the Northeast portion of Texas...the more we liked it.  We decided to stay in Texas in the end, we also thought we could get more land for less.

I am not sure how many houses we physically looked at, but we were trying to stay within a budget...and none of the houses we looked at, looked pretty, they needed a lot of work.  Some of them had structural flaws though and really bad layouts.  You really don't want a house that you have to duck to go up stairs or with a bathtub or shower that requires a step ladder because it is a foot off the ground...or a bathtub in the middle of a bedroom? We did look awhile and saw all of these things and more.  When we found the house we are in now, we thought it was all cosmetic and nothing so serious that we couldn't fix it fairly inexpensively.  We did have to rethink our budget and started looking at a better quality of homes with land.  My husband wanted a metal house, theses houses can withstand 160mph winds, we considered how many tornados hit in the areas we looked in.  The house we bought has 19.58 acres, a pond that is about 1/2 acre and it has fish in it, a shooting range, and it had 2 - 20'x20' slabs of concrete already poured.  We wanted a shop...but we settled for slabs.

We got tired of looking, I guess when you are looking for a house that you want to retire to you start looking at the views on the outside more than the house itself.  You can always fix the house, not so much the land.  You can plant things but they take a long time to look good.  The house we decided on, well it is ugly.  It is a big metal box. But, you cannot see our neighbors houses, there is a big field with trees and a pond, rolling hills across the street. All around the house has been cleared, but there are trees ringing the house on the edge of the property and 16 or so trees in what I call the back yard.  The front yard has several small trees.  The driveway is such, that there is a tree in the center of it with flowers around it.  It is something like a circular drive but kind of more tear drop shaped.  It was wintertime when we found the house, but there are a lot of pines and cedars so it was still green.  We looked forward to spring...and really thought we might actually see fall colors with all these trees.

Our Country House