Cheap Beer Wishes, Crawdad Dreams

An occasional fever to move just comes with the turf on Planet Homeownership.
Can we get a bigger house? Is there a better school district? Can we save tax money? Can we save on insurance? Can we get a better mortgage interest rate? Can we get some better neighbors? Can we afford this? How 'bout a faraway half bathroom I can hit before my morning run and avoid waking up kids?
You add all of this to natural human wanderlust, and it's a powerful drive, a deep-seeded instinct that whispers for us to move on. I have a good friend, Dave, who has The Fever so bad that his moves, to everywhere from China to Romania, have consumed several pages in my address book.
Right now, he's in Houston.
Just about everyone desires a higher quality of life, or maybe just something different, so from time to time, we ponder the domestic possibilities.
Ideally, I'd love to live in the mountains. My wife, Amy, on the other hand, loves the beach. The mountains are snowy and cold, while the beaches are steamy, gritty hurricane magnets. Some day, we'll find a happy medium, maybe a lake with some hills around it, but for now, being Beaumontoids will do.
We like our house and community just fine, but about once every six months we get the itch to see what else is out there. The itch arose earlier this month after a golf game on the outskirts of town.
Man, it would be nice to live next to a golf course on the outskirts of town.
Earlier this week, the wife and I took some online ganders at what's for sale in the area, and the itch turned to The Fever, just as it always does.
Man, it sure would be nice to get a bigger house, one in which my wife could scrapbook herself into a lather, the kids could have a recreation room and I could have a place for all the equipment I have to make rock music whose outbreak might rival bird flu in the horror department.
Oh, and don't forget that half bathroom!
House hunting is fun, like window shopping but with higher stakes and commitment level. The wife and I have driven all over Southeast Texas to look at houses.
Man, it would be nice to live here, there or anywhere than where we live now.
Yesterday, while snooping around the Internet, I found what appeared to be the perfect little gem, a massive, reasonably priced country home with five bedrooms and 2.5 baths "on 5 to 10 acres." A photo made the home look pretty good, too. A co-worker found the address on an Internet map and noted that "it's beautiful out there" and on a growth corridor that would ensure that the home retained or grew in value. That gave me visions of subdividing that 5 to 10 acres and making a fortune off the land sales.
And minutes later, by golly, during her own Internet search, the wife found the exact same house and sent me the link. We made plans to contact the realtor and check out the place sometime this weekend.
But I couldn't wait.
Driven by The Fever and with no lunch plans, I decided to drive out there today to see for myself. I envisioned a place perfect for raising our two young boys. They would walk down the road, side by side, with fishing poles over their shoulders. We'd sit out on that wraparound porch at night in the summer, observing fireflies, listening to croaking frogs, gazing at the stars, sipping cool drinks and patting ourselves on the backs for our spectacular fortunes.
Man, it would be nice to live in a place like that.
So I climbed into my car about noon today and drove.
And drove.
And drove.
And drove.
Apparently, the Internet map made the rural street seem much closer than it was, but I kept telling myself the long daily work drive would be a small price to pay for the Rockwell-painting lifestyle that awaited.
Finally, I arrived and hooked a right onto a narrow asphalt road that took me up to the house.
To say the least, it was certainly more than I imagined.
For starters, the photo showed a patch of dirt in front of the house. But what I thought was a patch of dead grass that easily could be replaced turned out to be the driveway.
Despite the empty house being less than five years old, it looked well-lived-in. In fact, it looked too lived-in.
Plywood covered up busted windows, and the floor was covered with a carpet that falls far out of our taste range. Looking into a bathroom window, I spied new life forms growing in a garden tub. A rickety-looking pier anchored to one side of the home jutted out into a weedy stock pond, a death trap for young children.
However, this wasn't the most interesting part.
I was alarmed to learn that seemingly half of the 5 to 10 acres of property was swamp. I'm not talking a pristine pond with some lily pads. I'm talking about a miniature Everglades, with turtles, snakes, alligators and murky, scum-covered water for the summer's perfect mosquito factory.
Someone literally had some prime swamp land to sell to someone else.
It's not that I'm some kind of snob who eschews swamp living, but this place really wasn't right for our family. It might be a dream for the right person, but now the wife and I must point The Fever in a new direction.
Ultimately, The Fever will break, and we'll develop new appreciation for our current abode, with its goofball corkscrew metal staircase to the near-useless open-air loft, a fraying carpet terminally stained through sippy-cup drops and a bedroom deficit that makes us long for larger digs.
But for now, man, I sure would love to live somewhere else.