Before my family and I lived in the suburbs of Chicago, we lived in the suburbs of Detroit. For a couple of years we knew we wanted to move back to Illinois, which is where we are originally from, but we didn’t know when the best time would be to move. Also, the housing market was—and still is—pretty bad. It’s easy to find a cheap house to buy in Michigan, but selling your house is a whole different story. We did not sell our house for as much as we paid for it, but we were still very glad that we were able to sell it at all. This was the summer before freshman year. When we were selling our house, we still did not know exactly where we were going to live. At first we had to choose between living in the Quad Cities, which is where we have a lot of family, and Chicagoland, which is the last place we lived before spending ten years in Michigan. It didn’t take long to decide that Chicago would be the better place to go because there are many more opportunities in a metropolis area than a rural area that is practically half farmland.
Eventually we made our main goal moving to a good school district, and decided that houses in the Maine South area are what we were looking for.
We looked at a number of places before choosing where we live now. I remember we looked at a two-flat apartment that was pretty nice and I liked it because it had a fireplace. I miss our old fireplace. I don’t think we got that one though because my parents didn’t like the location or something. Either way, we didn’t end up with that place. Another house we looked at was really spacious, but it was a foreclosure. If you know anything about selling homes, foreclosures are usually in the worst condition because the owners have probably stopped trying to keep it nice because the bank is repossessing it. Some people may even get extremely angry about it and start destroying the kitchen. But that’s usually only in extreme cases. This foreclosure that we saw had a nice, wide layout and was also in pretty good shape. But the area that it was in was not very good, so we had to move on and look at other houses. There was one house that I clearly remember because it was probably the weirdest house we saw the entire time we were house hunting. It was pretty small, just one level, but it had a good size backyard. But when we walked into the house, there was a lot of junk lying around. If you walk into someone’s house, that’s normal, because they are living there, are probably not planning to move. But if you are having a house showing, it’s best to clean your house as much as possible. But apparently this owner didn’t think that way. Not only was the house a disaster, but lying on the couch was some girl taking a nap. I couldn’t get a good look at the person, but I thought it was a girl. She was just dead asleep on the couch in the front room and didn’t even move when we walked in. I don’t know what that person was thinking when they decided to leave their house in that condition, but all I can say to that person is good luck selling your home.
In the end we were deciding between two houses that we were all okay with. We didn’t really love either, but they were decent enough compared to some other houses we saw. One was a house that had multiple levels and a basement that I really liked. It even came with a pool table to whoever was renting from it. The second was a one level house with a really large unfurnished basement, but also had a nice backyard. And if anyone got really bored, they could spend their day trying to fix the broken shower that was in the middle of the basement. I preferred the first home.
But of course we ended up with the second house because someone already placed a bid that was accepted on the first one.
I still like the house we live in now, though. After living here for almost three years, I’ve actually really grown to like the location. It’s different than what I was used to, but I like it more than Michigan because Michigan could be extremely boring sometimes. Well, actually most of the time. There was no downtown, you could barely walk anywhere, and most houses were cookie-cutter houses. I mean, it wasn’t all bad, but I like the atmosphere around Chicago a hundred times better than Sterling Heights.