I spent some years in apartments but would never do it again. Too many people too close for one thing. I like being outside without seeing or hearing anyone. My ideal home is what we have currently; a large home, rural location, on acreage, with multiple outbuildings, and no neighbors within eyesight.
Apartment dwellers: what if you wanna plant a tree or sit around a fire?
I love having open land around me. There are neighbors about 1/4 mile away from us and that’s fine for now, but I’d really rather live up in the north woods with no neighbors closer than a mile. I like relative silence and I like not having to think about other people and whether whatever I’m doing at a given moment is causing them distress. (Weird, I know, but that’s Minnesota Nice for ya.)
However, when you have a lot of land and a house, you have a lot of crap that needs fixing or mowing or trimming or painting. I can completely understand not wanting to take that on and preferring apartment or condo living.
Neither activity has ever crossed this city boy’s mind.
Plant a… what?
In all my years of living in apartments, I don’t ever recall thinking “gee, I’d like to plant a tree.” Now that I have a yard and can (and do) plants things, tree planting is not something I would miss. Sitting by a fire is nice.
I’d have no problem buying a house. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to build them in the middle of the city, which is the only place I’m willing to live.
Heh. Guess I got a little Johnny Appleseed in me. Seriously, nobody else plants trees? No Harry Behn types?
If I want to sit around a fire, I’ll go camping. I like camping. Might make a hunting weekend out of it, dependent of course on other circumstances.
Why in the name of Athena daughter of Metis daughter of Tethys daughter of Gaia the never-born would I want to plant a tree? Overton Park is only a few miles away and they have dozens of tree. Shelby Farms is a few miles further and they have hundreds of trees, not to mention bisons and horses. It’s big enough to get lost and die in, for Pallas’s sake.
I live in a neighborhood within the city limits, but it’s in a very woodsy area on the side of a steep hill. We can “freescape” here if we don’t want to do yard work, and many of us don’t, so aside from keeping fire-hazard brush cleared away from the house I don’t do any yard work. I have no lawn at all. When I tried to start up my lawn mower last summer, just for fun, I found it had died of neglect. It hadn’t been used since we left Omaha 12 years ago.
As far as getting up high, we are on a hill and my house has 6 levels. The top level is just under the forest canopy (oak, ash, Douglas fir and red cedar). It’s like living in a tree house in the woods, but with electicity and indoor plumbing. Not bad, eh?
We must be practically neighbors. I live close to Overton Park too.
We’re by the river, actually. 10 minutes from the park. One of the places we’re looking at is near the park, and since that’s your neighborhood, you can probably make a guess what it is (and why we may buy rather than rent).
Yeah few ideas. There are some nice condos available at Madison/Idlewild. I walk by there every day with the dog. There are lots of good deals in Midtown right now. My condo, for example, has lot about 30k in value. Ugh.
We bought the house we did, at least in part, because it was surrounded by trees already. I suppose if we’d bought into one of those neighborhoods where they cut down all the trees, then put in roads and houses, I’d have planted trees. But I would never have moved into a neighborhood like that.
For this stage of my life, a house with a yard, because I like being able to step out the door and do things outside with the Firebug. I might well feel different about it when I’m in my 80s, but that’s still a ways off.
I don’t think a single day goes by where I don’t stare disconsolately out of my second story apartment window and think how nice it would be to have a pretty yard that’s all mine.
My dream home shares no walls with neighbors. It has 2 stories, central heating and air, no ugly air conditioners sticking in windows and making me choose between hot and sticky and being able to hear. It has an attached 2 car garage, a large living room, an extra bedroom for guests, an open kitchen big enough for an island that i can roll doughs out on easily, a furnished basement that visiting children will gladly be banished to while I have guests over. There’s a backdoor patio off the kitchen with furniture so I can breakfast outside when the weather is nice and in the evenings play games and cards with family and friends. A firepit for evening cookouts. No carpet, just lovely hardwood floors with tasteful rugs, and a laundry room. No laundromats, no scrounging for coins for the basement washer and room for the cat’s litterbox so that it’s easily accessible for cleaning but not in a room that I spend much time in on a daily basis.
Who knows if I’ll ever get half of that, but that’s what I want. And if I ever get sick of yard maintenance, well, part of my financial plan is to make sure that whatever house I get, I can afford a regular lawn service.
Maybe I’m paranoid, but I’ve never like the idea of having trees right up on the house. Even before Hurricane Elvis, it just seemed to be begging for trouble. So even if we were looking at houses, I’d not want one with big trees close enough to crush it during a derecho.
ETA: And another thing. A few of y’all have commented on apartments being a bad idea because one’s neighbors are too close. I actually like that. I wrote in a thread once here that, when I’m alone and don’t want to buy, I’ll cook a big meal to lure people down the hall into visiting. (Of course, with the wife & baby, loneliness is much less likely to be an issue now.)
Five years ago during a kayak trip, we took a break under the biggest oak tree ever. I collect a bunch of its acorns which were the size of golf balls. I attempted germination, freezing them for a few months, then gradually warming and adding humidity. Most got moldy, but two germinated.
I planted one in a small pot and nursed it along. Midway through its first spring, while it was about four inches tall, a fucking chipmunk ate it.
So I planted the final acorn. I was more cautious with its pot, and it got through its first spring and summer. I over-wintered it in our garage under timed fluorescent lights. My gf and I went out and celebrated when it formed new buds at the tail end of winter.
I recently repotted the tree and in two more years it’ll be able to go into the ground. We have a spot picked out and have already begun amending the soil. Once it’s in the ground, with any luck it should start looking good in about forty years.
And fires. Where do you drink on summer evenings if you don’t have a spot to burn wood?
[QUOTE=kayaker;16308084 Where do you drink on summer evenings if you don’t have a spot to burn wood?[/QUOTE]
Indoors. Way to hot and humid during summers in the Mid-South.
I get it. The only reason we have a row house and are looking at houses is space. Around here, you can’t easily find a condo larger than a two bedroom.
Quite true. And I don’t drink much anyway, except in the company of the cousin mentioned in the OP, who always breaks open the good scotch when my brother & I visit. That said, I have a friend who gives great winter solstice parties which consist of sitting around a roaring fire in her back yard. When she first moved here, she tried to do them as fall equinox parties, but even late September in Memphis tends to be too warm for that.
Far, far away from any damn heat source, I’ll tell you that. We don’t build fires in the summer around here.