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Hunt for new home a moving experience

Last July, my husband and I were searching for a house. Our criteria: in Seattle, but close to Bellevue, and affordable — considering we later might have to include private-school tuition in our monthly budget.

We're reluctant yuppies who admire unapologetic architecture and contemporary oddballs, to the chagrin of our Realtor, who saw us in a "nice bungalow" in Ravenna. Thing is, all the "nice" ones were going for more than we wanted to spend. And, we had just left a "nice bungalow" in Evanston, Ill.

From experience, we knew that "charming" in real-estate-ese could just as easily mean "cramped." "Built in 1923" could mean drafty windows, lead paint and a bit of rotten wood. We learned the blue gel that's supposed to remove wallpaper doesn't work on five layers of 40-year-old paper interspersed with patches of Spackle. After owning an older home, we knew what work was, and we didn't want to reacquaint ourselves.

Besides, one important thing had changed since we bought our first home in 2000: We now want a kid. A child would mean we no longer could afford to focus as much on our own identity aspirations to guide our next house purchase. Our expensive two-bedroom, one-bath Evanston home, though renovated by yours truly, would split at the seams with a couple of kids — and split our pocketbooks along with it.

Our Seattle home would have to suit our future status as people who buy ice cream in half-gallons instead of pints. But Seattle's prices were steep. So we apprehensively devoted our second house-hunting trip to the Eastside — a term, we quickly learned, that means car-driven and suburban. In Issaquah, Bellevue and Redmond, we weighed that against "affordable." In a quandary, we returned to Seattle for further inspection.

Soon, our search spanned three bridges. Each time we crossed one and back, the dissonance heightened between our ideas of us now — and later, with children. Suburban cul-de-sacs? (I'm turning into my parents.) A Seattle neighborhood's inner-ring suburban character? (Is it just trendy?) Split-level? (Beige.) A lawn? (Wasteful, but kids play in them.) Acreage? (We're not people who need "acreage.") How will a house negotiate these knee-jerk reactions? How alienated will we feel when it fails to?

Real estate is one way to construct identity, which can be a moving target. "Meaning" changes as we progress through life. So the images conjured on either sides of 520, I-90 and the West Seattle Bridge might not be relevant by the time we refinance. Would we end up selling this house when our future selves no longer matched the images we're spinning today? It seems superficial and sad, but maybe it's true.

In Chicago, we would walk or bike to the train and then walk or bus it to work. Back and forth between tours of split levels in Bellevue, rundown bungalows in Seattle and Borg-like planned communities, I thought: "Will we end up trading pedestrian scale for perceived safety, a great school district and a lot of space?" Our future selves would require the latter — for less money than we had paid for our first house and within a half-hour's commute to Bellevue. Our current selves still hoped to find it all in Seattle.

The search

We stood in front of a three-bedroom, boxy, cedar-shingled contemporary — painted orange — near Aurora Avenue. (I saw it on www.seattlemodern.com Its price had dropped by $150,000. Granted, it didn't exude historical charm; an architect designed it in 1979, it looked that way and we liked that. At the corners, glass panes met without mullions. Power lines spliced the flat-rooftop views. Small bungalows lined nearly every other lot on the block.

Leery of the price drop, we wondered whether its style was the only thing holding up its sale. Looking for a neighbor to talk to, I saw a young couple with a baby Bjorn and requisite three-wheeled jogging stroller. I wondered whether they could afford a private school, trusted Seattle Public Schools or planned to move elsewhere in a few years. Where did education fit among their lifestyle signifiers?

The block's houses — perhaps once filled with middle-class families — now served primarily as tools of status for late 20-somethings. Would this orange number be just a status symbol for us? How long does a status symbol construct an identity, anyway?

I walked into several Seattle stores, asking shopkeepers where they lived and why. One proprietor, a Seattle resident with kids, said that as long as I bought in Queen Anne, Magnolia or Fremont, even Mount Baker, the public schools should be fine. I then asked how her kids have done in Magnolia's schools. She said they attended private. Oh.

Other journalists I met complained about the banality of Bellevue Square and the specter of the Eastside — shooting a look of apprehension that my life would be a torpor of cul-de-sacs should we buy across the bridges.

We decided to support these anecdotes with statistics. The half-inch thick, downloaded guide to Seattle Public Schools described the lottery system and listed WASL scores. I didn't think I would pander to test scores, but many city schools' scores were 20 points lower than those in the 'burbs.

Next up were crime stats and sex-offender lists. There were upward of 15 level-two and -three offenders in the Green Lake neighborhood alone; in all of Bellevue, there were nine in both levels.

Time to buy

I went back to Evanston to complete the last few weeks of my job. We had three weeks to find a house. Two days before that deadline, I found a new listing online at 3:30 a.m. I emailed my husband, who already was working here, so he could tour the house the following day. Twenty-three hours later, I was at a Kinko's in Skokie, Ill., faxing our Realtor my signed copy of our offer. It was accepted. I saw the house in person for the first time when we closed, a month later.

In the end, we turned to the Eastside, near the blatant sutures of zoning decisions east of Redmond. Ugly, ordinary and a bit exhilarating, they manifest economic and, hence, land-use change. A gravel plant sits next to the ribbon windows of a corporate office park. Next door, overgrown weeds shroud an abandoned '70s sedan and a "Ranchburger." These juxtapositions — industrial, commercial, residential — aren't precious, but a bit cowboy and postmodern.

But our home aspires to be more than a house. Perhaps it soothes our identities. Maybe it's easier to live uphill from the ugly and ordinary when you live in the extraordinary. Despite our awareness of it, perhaps we fell into the status-symbol trap, anyway: Designed in 1975 by an architectural illustrator, our new house exercises structural prowess. Whole, peeled logs penetrate the floorboards to become columns inside. Outside, they act as stilts on a sharply sloped site.

For a pedestrian, there's no destination once you step out of the driveway, unless you count a node of mailboxes. Yet some of my transportation patterns haven't changed; I just have fewer possible modes. At first, I drove to the Redmond park-and-ride lot and took a bus to work everyday. That soon changed. Unlike trains, the bus doesn't run like clockwork. Working until 9:30 p.m. meant I got home at 11 on the bus; with a car, I could be home at 10. I shop at Trader Joe's and a large grocery chain, just as I did in the Chicago area. Only now, there's no possibility of biking or walking there. Maybe I was just in love with the idea of having the choice to be a pedestrian.

Here, we love the trees, the mountains and, yes, the weather. It's like driving in a postcard. And while we enjoy the house, and feel privileged to live in a unique space, we ended up sacrificing a sense of neighborhood for a cool object that sits in a school district we don't worry about.

Rosemarie Buchanan is a Redmond-based writer.