A room by any other name...

[YinzerMama]

You perhaps remember the time I met Stu and Gloria, who live in my neighborhood, on the cool street. They asked where we lived. We told them. "Oh," they said. "I guess that counts as West Central."

MKD

Are you telling me you're not cool???

[cadrad]

if it makes you feel better my living room is 13x 30 with the huge fireplace at one end of the long wall with a huge 8 ft long window (with an 8 foot radiator under it) on the short wall ajacent and a 6 foot wide cased opening oposite. makes furniture arainging interesting! Oh and all of the radiators in the house are in the most awkward spots ever for curtains.

[melissakd]

You perhaps remember the time I met Stu and Gloria, who live in my neighborhood, on the cool street. They asked where we lived. We told them. "Oh," they said. "I guess that counts as West Central."

MKD

Are you telling me you're not cool???

No, my dear, Stu and Gloria are telling you I'm not cool. Thanks for the vote of confidence. I could use it just now.

MelissaKD

[YinzerMama]

No, my dear, Stu and Gloria are telling you I'm not cool. Thanks for the vote of confidence. I could use it just now.

MelissaKD

Well you've always been OK in my book for what that's worth.

I forgot to add one of the craziest parts of this puzzle... the owner of this house now lives next door. I know, it's just layer upon layer of weirdness, Supposedly she was older and needed a smaller house and from the front her current house looks like a small one story. However as the crow flies, it takes up her entire property, which is 7,000 some sq ft. It just sprawls. Between the two properties, an easement was created - by her - which when we first learned of it, it didn't seem so odd, people do that all the time, it's no big deal, you'd have to be a total ass to have an issue with your neighbor using your side yard anyway, right? It's just there because with all the additions her new house goes right up to her property line. So they keep talking about how the house we want(ed) to buy deserves a high price because it's on a lot and a half - which is true - but at the same time it's like she moved and took part of her yard with her! It's a VERY small thing, but it's part of the bigger picture of the crazy. So this lady would be our neighbor, if we bought the house. When I learned that, I thought, um, I don't know about that... but I pictured maybe some feeble little old lady who would die off soon - this was before we realized how HUGE the one story is - but she was there the day we did our second walk through and she was only like in her mid 40s, maybe low 50s, looked to be in very good health and good shape - very surprising.

So apparantly this lady's nuttiness is known far and wide. After our second walk through we were walking through the neighborhood and I started talking to a lady one street over about flooding in the area - it is a floor plain but the house we are looking at is WELL back from the river. My dad keeps harping at me about flooding though. SO I asked this lady since she lived there and wasn't trying to sell me anything what about flooding this far up and she said she had never had a problem. When I told her about the house we were looking at she said oh you need to be careful with that house, they split up the property and moved the property line, you don't really get the whole yard! It is NOT as weird as all that but it is strange and the whole neighborhood seems to know about it.

Oddly the owners new lot is bigger than the old lot and she did NOT pay a lot for her property... maybe we should throw that out there, LOL. But I am feeling now that even if they called us up today and said they would sell at our price, we'd say no after all. *sigh*

Househunting is NOT fun. This is the first house we have been in that I could really SEE myself living in AND was in a good school district. (We have been in some awesome houses that feed to some of the less desirable of the Pittsburgh city schools, there is the hope of getting into a magnet school but we don't want to count on that and we don't want to pay for private...) But really so far nothing is comparing to the house I am currently in. My house is so awesome!!! I just want to hug every past owner who didn't wreck or remuddle the inside yet made improvement such that this is really an old house you can live in as a modern person.

[Sekhmet]

Househunting is NOT fun. This is the first house we have been in that I could really SEE myself living in AND was in a good school district. (We have been in some awesome houses that feed to some of the less desirable of the Pittsburgh city schools, there is the hope of getting into a magnet school but we don't want to count on that and we don't want to pay for private...)

Bit of a sidebar but I just want to say, I can totally relate. I would have loved to live in downtown St. Louis, but the city schools are notoriously horrible. Nobody sends their kids there who can afford a private school or get their kids into a magnet school. I was really tempted to move into the city and go for the magnet school route (not interested in parochial school), but we just couldn't take the risk; if we didn't get our daughter into a decent/good magnet school we'd have been in a major predicament. It sucks. They're trying really hard to revitalize the city, and they are succeeding slowly, but the infamous school district is a major achilles' heel to their efforts. It's a vicious cycle: they need more people to move into the city to bring in the money to better fund the school district, but until the district IS better, it's hard to get people to move in and bring the $$$!

[mross_pitt]

Hi YinzerMama,

Tired of living near a house covered in plastic with collapsed out buildings?
Which part of town are you looking to emigrate to(If I may ask)?

Good neighborhood, front porch, good schools, sidewalks, parades, old houses?
That narrows it down to probably two or three areas in Pittsburgh!


I recall you were looking to move backs towards the South Hills area?
Mt Lebo.? (the school district w/ no school buses!)



We have a new neighbor(ok 6 months now) with a kid the exact age of mine. Three houses away. How many times have we seen her?... once.. when her mom was taking out the garbage. We did hear she is a non public school child. Maybe you're right...maybe because we're the public school type.

[YinzerMama]

sekhmet - pittsburgh is doing the same thing ... they are trying to bring in new bodies with the pittsburgh promise. they will give grads 20k for college and up to 40k based on sat scores or something - the catch is there is a HUGE variation in the different pittsburgh schools. we looked at two GORGEOUS houses in an area called Friendship and one in an area called HIghland Park we loved but then you have the magnet school hopes thing... we are also not parochial school types, while those are cheaper than other private schools, really not my thing. So. I have heard people in Highland Park move if their kids don't get in the magnets. If we move again I really want this to be IT so we are picking very very carefully. It would be nice if the Pittsburgh schools were all equally desirable.

mross - there was a house near my dad I had high hopes for. I grew up in this weird little pocket of Munhall that is technically city of Pittsburgh. But like so many houses this one looked awesome on the web site and not so awesome in real life. I think we could have made it work but my husband said no way, LOL. So then we started looking at Squirrel Hill and quickly realized our ballpark figure of $300k was not going to really work to find a house for 4 kids - even raising that number we weren't finding much. Partly because the market there tends to be hot in Jan/Feb according to our agent so it's really picked over now. So we started considering Aspinwall/O'Hara again which is where we were looking when we first moved. The stuff in O'Hara really feels like it's putting us even further out than we already are and a lot of houses in fancy sounding subdivisions didn't have any or much yard. There was one house my husband loved but it had NO yard - just woods - which sloped downhill - so I vetoed that. And they were all just too new... I really don't want a new house. The house we put the offer on was in Aspinwall. So now we stalk the aspinwall/squirrel hill market until the right house comes up. Or who knows maybe we never move. If we fix up the scary room and put in AC... This could work. The biggest problem is our 4th bedroom is super tiny but kids have lived with worse right?

eta and I want to KNOW the people in the plastic covered house with collapsed out-buildings LOL ... but at this point what do you say? Hey there, I live around the corner. Are you moving in or flipping this? Plus they are so far back from the road you can't do the casual banter thing, you have to YELL TO BE HEARD... or actually walk up to them, which crosses bounderires ...

[KristenS]

pittsburgh is doing the same thing ...they will give grads 20k for college and up to 40k based on sat scores or something

This sounds INCREDIBLE! I just read the Pittsburgh Promise website. The only thing that seems a little strange is that you've got to go college in Pennsylvania. I know I didn't want to go to college in my home state!

I could have used that $20,000 though.

EDIT I just read more. The scholarship only kicks in AFTER loans. And it's based on the cash contribution line from the FAFSA.

In my case, my cash contribution per year was under $1000. But my loans were around $6000 per year. Under the Pittsburgh Promise model, they'd be paying $4000 toward my total education. But I'd still be stuck with the exact same $24,000 in loans when I graduated.

So...it's kind of useless to anyone who's poor. It's better off if the FAFSA leaves you with a higher cash contribution. Which only happens if you've got money to begin with.

[Sekhmet]

pittsburgh is doing the same thing ...they will give grads 20k for college and up to 40k based on sat scores or something

This sounds INCREDIBLE! I just read the Pittsburgh Promise website. The only thing that seems a little strange is that you've got to go college in Pennsylvania. I know I didn't want to go to college in my home state!

I imagine that it's to encourage promising students to stay in state, since it's tied to SAT scores. Missouri has something called Bright Flight, where if you get at least a 30 on your ACT, graduate high school with at least a 3.5 GPA, and attend college in MO, you get $2k per year. (That's regardless of loans and other scholarships - my genius little sister would have actually earned a profit of $2k per year to go to school in Missouri b/c she would have had a full scholarship from the school - instead she went to Duke and will be paying off her school loans for many years to come, LOL).

[YinzerMama]

I don't know realistically how much the Pittsburgh Promise would help us. We're not rich, but we're comfortable. DH blanches at the thought of putting 4 though college. The thing is though to look at how much a house in the city will cost, plus wage tax and property taxes, over time it might end up being a wash. Plus there is the worry how long will this really last? How do we really know it will come to fruition by the time all our kids are ready for it? So we're not set on it. It's a nice perk, but all things considered, living further out in a cheaper house with a better school district might end up being the better way to go. But living in city of Pittsburgh would have put us closer to my family, which is why we don't want to go TOO far out. Where we are now, the schools are not bad by any means, but they're not sought after, either. I really just wanted a more walkable friendly sidewalked neighborhood... with a porch swing... but man, my house is seriously awesome. I'm determined we'll find a house in a good school district that I walk into and say "I LOVE this house" - so far we're mostly finding, "Eh, this could work..." and when we don't really HAVE to move, that's not worth moving over. Oh - and there are some good schools in PA so having to stay in state isn't so bad. If the kids want to get away, they can go to the east side of the state, with all those weird New York accent talking people... LOL