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11:16 p.m. - 2005-02-05
Fox River Bummer

It was a lovely ride but now I'm bummed.

Damn the real estate web site www.realtor.com. I am addicted to that site. I spend countless hours on it that I could be doing other things searching for my dream house. I say damn that site because 9 out of 10 times the pictures of the houses look 1000 times nicer than they do in real life. In the pictures, the lot sizes look huge. The houses look bigger. A shack looks quaint instead of sad, sorry and saggy. Or maybe it is just my wishful thinking.

Because I am the only one working in my family, (and even if Mike were working, I never want to be in a situation where I can't make the mortgage payments on one salary,) we can only get a $200,000.00 home. The problem is that you have to drive a long long way from Chicago to find a $200,000.00 home that is not a condo or a shack.

I go on this real estate site. They have homes listed all over the country and if it ain't on this site it ain't for sale. I monitor the real estate offerings for the towns that I deem acceptable to live in and I am even willing to drive an hour to get to work. I found out today that an hours drive from work may not be far enough to get a nice home for $200,000.00.

Today I went to St. Charles Illinois with a stack of print outs from the site that looked promising.

The first neighborhood did indeed look like the perfect place. It was a wooded neighborhood of nice homes surrounded by two forest preserves and with country roads leading down to the Fox River and hiking trails leading off in all directions. (Photo of river view below.)

There were three homes between 175,000.00 and 200,000.00 in this neighborhood that all looked like nice homes in good condition. A smile spread accross my face as I road through this neighborhood.

"Yesssss...Yesssss!!!" I cried as I made my way down the steep bank. Just before I got to the road that runs along the river, I noticed an institutional looking building sticking out through the trees like a sore thumb. At first I thought it was a power plant until I got closer and realized that it was a maximum security prison. So that is why the homes in this neighborhood were under $200,000.00....Um...No Thanks."

My hopes were not dashed however as I had more neighborhoods to roam. The second neighborhood had a woodsy feel and a riverside location and were cozy cottages of the 1920's era but they were so close together that they might as well have been condos. None of them had a yard. I got the impression that it was some sort of 1920's retreat...a campground that 1920's people from Chicago owned cottages in and came to on the weekend. Now the cottages were lived in year round and passed for houses. The street one of the cottages was on was more narrow than a city alley way, more of a bike path. Cute...but no cigar.

I roamed other neighborhoods in St. Charles, including the downtown area and historic district. One home that looked perfect in the picture turned out to be aluminum sided and appeared to have been hit by 1000 hail storms. Other houses..cute in the pictures...were simply junky looking in real life.

I do an awful lot of complaining about the traffic here in my town, much closer to Chicago and 1 mile from O'Hare International Airport, but nothing could have been more jam packed than downtown St. Charles.

I left St. Charles, wishing that I had the money to have one of the bigger, fancier homes on the outskirts, but St. Charles was not going to be the town that I find my $200,000.00 dream in.

On the way home, I drove through the town of Wayne, Illinois. Now there's a town. It is completely wooded, most of the homes look like they were built in the 1800's, they are all sitting on 1/2 and full acre parcels of land and even the smallest of the houses has a little horse barn. This is the kind of place they still have fox hunts with people dressed up in all that pretentious attire...Red coats, black knee high boots and little riding hats. (They no longer use a fox though.)

I cruised around that area for awhile just wishing I had the bucks I knew it would take to live there. I snapped a couple of pictures.

When I got home, I went on the real estate site to see what a smallish home in Wayne might go for. Still out of my league, but not so far that I can't dream a little, I found two for sale under $300,000.00. If both of us were working, we could possibly swing that...then I did some research on the property taxes. Sure enough, they are high enough to keep the riff raff out. The property taxes on a 300,000.00 home in Wayne would be about $8000.00 per year...that is $600.00 per month....damned near as much as I pay on my cracker box...mortgage taxes and all. Even if one had a paid off home in Wayne, you would still need to come up with $600.00 per month for the privledge of living there....still...if I ever get rich, I will entertain the idea.

OK...So far...off the list is Lombard, Addison, Elk Grove, Schaumburg, Geneva, and now St. Charles. That leaves Aurora, Bolingbrook, Elgin and Dundee to check out, and West Chicago may work if the right place comes up in the right part of town.

Somehow after seeing what was available out there...my little crackerbox looked a little bit better when I got home.

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