When shopping for a house, the first decision you need to make is where to shop. (Kind of like clothes only without the handy return or exchange policy and a much heftier price tag!) The immediate decision, depending on where you live, goes first and foremost

City living? 

Or Country / Rural living?

North GA in my town

When Alex and I started shopping we, well mostly me, had the following requirements:

1. No increasing my already long 45+ minute drive to work
2. A certain county because of its school districts and potential for future resale value
3. No HOA in the neighborhood (and I realize you can argue both sides of this, but for us . . .None is the better side)
4. And lastly, cannot be inside a city.

Now, I’m sure most people can understand reasons one thru three. Reason four though . . . after just espousing the need to NOT increase my drive to work, why on earth would I want to ensure we lived further away from grocery stores, entertainment, gas stations, public transit, and pretty much every darned thing? There is no one definitive answer, but the shortest and clearest one we have is two-fold, first – it’s cheaper in the country and second, we ARE country. Or to clarify, we are anything but city. I mean, in planning how to decorate this weird space over the dining room to kitchen door I planned to use plates of roosters and the like, (it’s a ledge that is a whopping 8-10 inches wide before becoming an open space again. It’s like they created a doorway just for giggles, not for a really purpose.) Not that I have an issue with that preference, it’s just simply not us. We, oddly enough, like having a yard and a fence (falling down and needing replacement that it is) and being all suburban like. We are ok in our very lack of hipness, well except with our boots. Our boots are hip. Deal.

This very fact was made extremely clear to me yesterday as I was driving both towards and home from a bridal shower for my college roomie, S.

S, forgive the photo being from my wedding but I haven’t fixed your shower photo yet, and be grateful it’s not the hair photo. Which is only because I have no scanner. Consider yourself forewarned.

See the shower was south of Atlanta, which meant I had to drive THROUGH Atlanta. Which, on any given day involves dead stop crawling traffic. You don’t believe me? We are the 3^rd worst traffic in the nation. UGH! But I love S to death, so I drove gladly. However, after almost getting t-boned on the way home by someone who did not understand the merge of spaghetti junction, where three major interstates merge into a single interstate for a whopping 5 miles or so, as well as a veritable army of crazy drivers I was SO glad to be back on my roads. Yes, I drive past at least four farms on my way to and from work. Yes, the cows across from our neighborhood drink water out of bathtubs (don’t ask…I’ll try to get a picture up here to show you what I mean soon). Yes, my local high school was across from the emu farm and our parking lot used to belong to the dairy. But man, there is something great about the biggest concern on your way to work being whether or not the turkeys are crossing the road again!

Yup, country life is the life for me. But what about you? What do you prefer?