House hunting

What is the best place to buy a house in the Washington, D.C., metro area? You came to the right place. My wife and I just survived this process and are ideally situated to give you advice on where to purchase your home.

A little background to establish our bona fides. My wife, Carissa, has a Ph.D. and is comfortable in the world of algorithms, cluster analysis, linear regressions, and other nerd stuff. She knows how to mine data, identify trends, separate sound from noise. Also, somewhere along the way she picked up a nasty reality television habit for shows about real estate and home renovation. The good news is that all those weekends spent in her pajamas in bed watching HGTV while eating cereal out of a bowl worked to our advantage.

I bring a slightly different skill set to the search. Mostly I add nuance, the ability to tease out intangibles invisible to less observant eyes, extract details that cannot be measured by formula or equation. I am the one to point out that living on a street called “Unicorn Lane” is a deal-breaker no matter how much we love the house, or to recommend adding a house to the “favorites” list after learning from google maps that it is four blocks from a liquor store.

I guess this is where I should disclose that the only non-bullshit answer to where you should live in the D.C. metro area is “it depends.” For us, it came down to finding a house that felt right for our family that was within our budget with the best schools and shortest commute possible. Hardly something you couldn’t have figured out on your own. Nonetheless, finding a house that matched these criteria would have been much simpler had we avoided the colossal mistake of not being rich. So becoming rich would be something you should do before house hunting in D.C.

The primarily benefit of listing our priorities – cost, school, commute – was to help identify and eliminate places we didn’t want to live. We skipped the McMansion in some far-flung suburb with an apartment-sized walk-in-closet in the master bedroom because it was too far from the downtown D.C. area where both of us work. We nixed the reasonably priced, abandoned crack house as well, even though we would both be able to walk to work. Carissa was intrigued by its “good bones,” which I understand to be a real estate term that means “expensive renovation project.” But we were troubled by the undesirable neighbors (too many members of Congress moving into the vicinity).

Here’s something else I can tell you, based on our research. The best place for you to buy a home in the D.C. metro area is the place you end up buying a home. This may seem bassackward, but it must be true because I have yet to find a single person who will tell me that they screwed up and wished they had purchased a different home. If you happen to have a commute from hell, you focus on the fact that you have three hours a day on a train or bus where you can catch up on your reading. If your local school district is over-crowded with low test scores, you talk about the wonderful diversity. You also point out that the snooty neighborhoods have schools full of over-privileged punk kids with misplaced senses of entitlement where academic pressures are extreme.

So there you go. As for us, we finally found a home just outside the District in Maryland that fits our family in a wooded (i.e., snooty) neighborhood with great schools. We move in next week. It comes with vintage avocado-colored kitchen appliances and good bones.

Anybody know any good contractors in Montgomery County?