When Buying a Home, Consider your Lifestyle
When you decide to buy a house, it’s easy to keep your focus on the house itself. How many bedrooms? How big a garage? Open kitchen? Formal dining? Wood- burning fireplace? Trex deck?
Once you’ve decided on these aspects of your future home, you head to your favorite search engine and start typing in parameters. You fiddle with requirements, adjust your price. Eventually, you see the twenty or so homes that meet your requirements.
Time to start shopping? Not quite.
Your lifestyle will have a huge impact on how happy you’ll be in a particular home. In the long run, your lifestyle-not your house– may be the most important factor in everything ranging from convenience to community.
For example, do you love to run your dog after work and on weekends? Making sure the home you choose has a nearby dog park could save many hours in traffic.
Is it important to be able to walk to your favorite coffee shop or restaurant? If so, you’ll want to make sure that they are close to home.
What’s your favorite form of transportation? If you often use the light rail, choosing a home in walking distance might be an important part of your preferred lifestyle.
Are you the kind of cook who likes to decide what’s for dinner during your lunch break, and stop by the store on your way home? You’ll want to make sure the store you like to shop at is on the way home, and not fifteen minutes (more, in traffic) in the other direction.
Schools, parks, grocery stores, playgrounds, coffee shops, restaurants, movie theaters–depending on your lifestyle, convenient access to important places might affect your overall happiness more than whether the fireplace burns wood or pellets, and the size of your kitchen island.