When we started looking for a house, we sat down together and made a mental list of what qualities we wanted in a place we’re going to live for at least the next ten years.

We both are country people, and if possible, we wanted a place in the country. An acre parcel that had been split off from someone else’s orchard and stil surrounded it would be perfect, but anything that gave us a little elbow room and freedom from neighbors peering in the windows would do.

We wanted to raise the kids in the country; sure there’s a trade-off when it comes to lots of kids in the neighborhood and good bike-riding streets.

We wanted room to have a shop and maybe a pool or some pens for 4-H livestock, so that set our basic size requirement to about an acre.

We wanted to be between his work and mine, although he acknowledged that it’s more important to be closer to mine since I’m the one who’s on-call all the time. Ironic that, since I’m the one who actually doesn’t mind a little bit of a commute.

We wanted a house big enough for the six of us, but it didn’t have to be monstrous. The kids can share rooms as long as there’s enough living space in the rest of the house for everyone to get away from each other once in a while.

But what’s available around here isn’t quite what we were looking for. We ended up mostly looking in Yuppieville, a big subdivision really, although the lots are at least acres and the houses are all custom. You can at least have things like shops and steers, but it’s not a farming community any more. It has pretensions of being one, and it sure used to be, but these days the only crop around there is baby Yuppies. It’s crawling with McMansions, some more pretentious than others. That’s what we were looking at because there just wasn’t anything else around.

The one we have an offer on is a McMansion all prettied up to look like a country house, in fact. You walk inside and it’s that typical big open space, high-ceilinged look. It’s nice, and we do like it, but we’ve strayed a little bit from our original goals. No matter how much decorating we do to that house, it’s always going to show those bones.

So when a true country house went on the market this week, our agent called us. I happened to have time, so I drove by to see if we should go look at it. And it’s ugly from the front, but we’re learning to see through ugly into the truth of a house. This one was worth looking at, even with the horrible early-80s Spanish-style chunky stucco on the surface.

We walked through it on Sunday, and the first impression was also sort of shocking. It’s decorated before its time even, with that gold-leaf wallpaper that you saw in the 70s, not the 80s. Get in past the entryway though, and things improve. The kitchen has updated appliances, and even though the cabinets are really dark colored, they’re of extremely good construction. The living room has a gorgeous brick fireplace going all the way to the ceiling. There’s a loft opening right onto the living room, and it’s done up as a grown-up playroom, a concept that we could really get behind.

There’s a lot of storage there for a house of this era, even if not as much as the Yuppieville house. Yuppies do like their pantries, and I have to admit that I do too, but there is more than enough room for me in this kitchen too.

We’d have to build a shop over in Yuppieville, and possibly a pool too, if we really wanted one. There is no landscaping at all in that backyard. Junior doesn’t mind that so much as I do; he looks at it and sees that he gets to design it. I lok at it and see money and work. This place has a small pool, but a nice one, and a standing shop. It’s not the shop he would build himself, but it’s already there and better than nothing.

Things need work in this place, but almost everything that does is cosmetic, and we could absolutely live in it while we plug away at one piece at a time. Once we started thinking about the things we could do to this place to make it ours, I started to get more excited about it. The other one, we could repaint all we wanted, and it would still be somewhat generic. If we start making changes to this house, there will be nothing generic about it.

The bones of this little house suit us better in the long run, I think. The money’s about even when you consider how much work it will take to bring each to what we want, if not a little bit in the Country house’s favor.

I think the ultimate deciding factor for us is what kind of people we are and what kind of life we want to live. We could have a long and happy life in Yuppieville, sure, but at heart we’re Country people. We’ve both lived in town and out, and independently came to the conclusion that that’s who we are and who we want to be.

So after we check on some more details and maybe go take some photos of the Country house, we’ll make an offer on it. If it’s accepted, we’ll withdraw the offer on the Yuppie house, which hasn’t had a response yet anyway. If we’re going to take our lives in a particular direction, this house would be a good way to help it along.