Pictures of the place that will soon be "home".

We went to the condo on Saturday to take measurements and some pictures. Our unit is the one right in the middle of the picture on the left. The picture in the middle pretty much shows the whole place (except for the bedroom, which is off to the right). The loft is big enough to serve as a "den" for us, and an extra bedroom when people visit. The last picture in the set below is the view from the loft. It's hard to tell from this picture, but you can see the Boston city skyline through the window.



This is the kitchen and bathroom. It looks like most of the new condos being built these days, so there's nothing terribly special about it, but everything's shiny and new, which should be nice.


It was a typical cloudy New England March day, so the outdoor pictures don't exactly bring to mind a sunny day at the beach, but a grey day on the coast can be nice too. Our private balcony is 6'x8', which isn't huge, but big enough to put a small table out so that we can eat outside. The whole public beach is 3.8 miles long, which makes it one of the largest public beaches on the east coast (well, the northeast anyway). Since the stretch of the beach in front of our place is now a residential area, they've designated it a "quiet zone" at night. This is a new law, and it remains to be seen how well it will be enforced.

Homeowners

I know we haven't posted anything for a _long_ time, but I just wanted to quickly say that Jessica and I bought a brand new condominium at an auction today.   The place is right on Revere Beach, which is about 5 miles north of downtown Boston, and is on the MBTA's "Blue line" train, which can get you into Boston in about 15 minutes.  We got one of the only units that has an outdoor porch with views of both the ocean and the city skyline.

This is an area that wasn't so nice from the 70's through the late 90's...   It seems to be on the up-and-up for now, although I think that story is still playing out.  Either way, we got the place cheap enough (we paid about $110k below the developer's original price) that if the "revitalization" doesn't seem to be happening after a couple of years, we should still be able to sell it for the price that we paid.  In the mean time, it should be nice living near the water, and it will be good to get the tax breaks that come with making payments on a mortgage.   And our mortgage payments will be less that we've both been paying for rent recently.   More on all of this later!

Here are some pictures of our home (from when the Boston Globe reported on the auction...  I don't think they're particularly good, so I'll bring the camera next time and hopefully we'll be able to post some better ones soon!)