Why We Chose to Move to Mesa + Our House Hunting Checklist
As you know by now, we recently bought and renovated our home…but the location was a big change for us! We moved from Danny’s condo in Arcadia, which if you’re unfamiliar with the area is a pretty sought after area in the Phoenix area. We used to ride our bikes everywhere – to some of Arizona’s best restaurants and bars, to Papago Park, down the canal…you name it. We were also super centrally located and minutes from the freeway.
A lot of people have asked me why we chose to leave such a great area. The biggest reason I guess was that our lifestyle was just evolving into wanting a dog and starting a family soon, and most of our checklist “needs” and wants just didn’t exist in the Arcadia/Scottsdale area (unless you want to custom build or spend close to $1M). After a year of watching the market and a good month of house hunting in our area we decided to expand our search to the East Valley, which is a great part of town to raise a family with great schools, people, and family-oriented areas and activities. But also still with some great restaurants and entertainment, too!
The house we bought ended up filling ALL of our needs, most of our wants, is only 10 minutes longer of a commute, and was super under budget! Plus we got some perks that we didn’t even have on our list like: now we’re closer to our favorite grocery stores and two Spring training stadiums, closer to the highway to our cabin, a corner lot with a greenbelt right in front of us (the sunset from our front yard is breathtaking – I put a photo of it above…the greenbelt is to the right in the photo just directly in front of our house), extremely friendly neighbors that invited us into the neighborhood like family, and a LOT less traffic. The feel of the town is also so much different than where we lived before and what I was used to growing up in North Scottsdale…people at the grocery store say hi to us, make conversation, and remember our names – some guy even bought our entire grocery cart at Sprouts just because! We were shocked. Everyone is also very laidback here and that is what we love most about the area. Yes, we have to drive a little further to get to our favorite restaurants but it’s also been motivating me to cook more often again. Basically, we love it!
Here was our “needs vs wants” checklist while house hunting:
Needs:
- Open common areas or potential to be if remodeled (we had to knock down a wall to get this)
- High ceilings (this literally did not exist where we were looking in Arcadia/Scottsdale!)
- 2-car garage – check
- Large backyard – check
- Character – check, kinda…it was built in the 80’s but it’s not a tract home which we were trying to stay away from (nothing against them, just not what we were going for!)
- Large master bath and closet – check
- A real entryway/not entering directly into living or dining room – check
- Space for bar area (yes you read that right, it’s on our needs list)
- Kitchen island (I compromised with a faux-island that still has seating space for bar stools, but it’s basically an open galley kitchen)
- Lots of storage – check
- Indoor laundry – check
- Close to freeways, especially the 202 for work and the b-line, which we take to the cabin – check
- Cheap enough to redo a lot of things to our taste – check
- Tons of natural lighting – check
- Privacy! Neighboring house situation feels more spread out/not sitting on top of each other (this also was very few and far between in Arcadia/Scottsdale and we hit the jackpot with our house because it’s a corner lot with a greenbelt right in front of us so we only have two neighbors who are both great!)
- Quality kitchen cabinetry, not just painted old cabinets…we didn’t want to spend a good chunk of our renovation budget on new cabinets, they can get pricey! (the house we bought has some great custom Kraft cabinetry – all we had to do was paint!) I put a photo of our kitchen below.
Wants:
- RV gate – check
- Toy storage for future off road toys – check, our casa came with a shed on the side of the house
- Fireplace – no UGH so sad, but also wasn’t really available in Arcadia/Scottsdale either. Our two other house contenders had fireplaces though but were $50k more expensive.
- Pretty view – the sunset view from our front yard is insanity – I put a photo of it above, also we have a view of camelback mountain, the mcdowell mountains, and the superstition mountains from the all streets around the house
- Close to bike paths – we literally live ON a bike path that goes to Tempe and the two Spring training stadiums, and Downtown Gilbert…so great
- Updated drywall (no orange peel) – yassss check, so so so important to me
- Close to entertainment and restaurants – this one we had to give up some driving distance
- Backyard access from master – I love patios off the master and we were going to switch our master window to French doors and put a little landing outside, but that area outside is a garden right now and we decided to keep the garden. Which we will be planting this week! It’s on our list of projects for 2019 if you haven’t read that post yet.
- 4 bedrooms – we have 3 :/ so it limits the time we can spend at this house due to the future kiddo situation. So once I’m pregnant with our second we will have to move!
- Dedicated dining area as well as breakfast nook – check
- Mudroom area – kinda…it’s in our garage and also our laundry is right off the garage inside, so we put shoes at the shoe drop in the garage and keys/bags in a dedicated area of the laundry
- French doors to backyard – we were also going to switch a window by our dining room to French doors, and we still might! However it will break up our patio differently to where the entrance is, so we will have to carefully think about this one.
We were neutral on a pool: it would be great to have one, but it would also be great to not have the cost or maintenance associate with it.
