I've moved, recently. From the "city," as people in Central Oregon think of it, to the country. Truly the country.
I wasn't sure I was going to care for it at first. I was dreading the commute and I was a little worried about the isolation and lack of services out here. To reinforce this fear, I recently needed an emergency veterinarian and had to drive a half hour into Bend to get one. That definitely sucks.
Turns out it's not so bad. I'm sure there's an on-call vet closer and we'll find them. The commute turns out to be not so bad and there are even some people I can carpool with to make it a little less bad still. In addition, there are some really nice things about it.
In the country we can afford about five acres more land than we could in Bend. That is, we can afford about five acres of land. It's a nice little lot. It even has a sound-facing slope we might use to grow grapes, if we can find grapes that like Central Oregon.
Our indoor/outdoor cat is really digging the new digs as well. Five acres is a lot of roaming space with all kinds of new things to smell and a new kind of soil in which to roll around. She still hasn't figured out what her territory is going to be but I imagine the neighboring dogs will help her define those boundaries. I knew this would matter to me, our cats' quality of life is important to us.
We're on top of a knoll - that's why we have a south-facing slope - so we have a view in all directions. I didn't think I'd care about that but it appears I do. To further improve upon things, the house is two stories with the living area on the second story and a wrap-around deck so the view is enhanced by being above the juniper trees.
Out here, I can afford a much bigger place. The living area here is just shy of the whole house we had in bend. Then downstairs area has a real two car garage; meaning there's two doors with ample room to fit two large American cars.
Even better, there's a very large shop. I'm not really a "shop" guy but my wife and I have a plan to turn that into a work out/recreation room. The wrap-around deck also has two enlarged areas where tables, chairs, etc. can be put. That means we don't have to store as much of our outdoor junk in our garage!
Better still, there are a couple of small out-buildings for storage, one of them with power and phone that I'm considering turning in to my home office. I'm not sure about that, yet. It could get chilly in the winter. If nothing else, those sheds are about as much storage as we had in our old garage.
So, all told, the number of square feet we have to put our junk in has dramatically improved. I didn't think that would matter either but I was wrong. Having a nice, light, open space as a sanctuary in which to work with lots of potential for development ended up having an immediate and dramatic psychological impact for the better that outweighs the drawbacks many times over.
