On Sunday Sarah and I were returning from our morning brunch at Eastern Standard with Matt B. and the Falkoffs when we saw a sign for an Open House pointing down a side street off of Beacon. Since we have been eyeing the living spaces that everyone else lives in and it was only near the end of the daily house tour schedule at 3PM we decided to drop-in and warm the baby up. We have been thinking about our future need to switch nests to accommodate more of the little tykes in the coming years and now that we are out and about with Madeline we figured it couldn’t hurt to begin looking two or three years before it becomes necessary to move. The people at the Open House were the owners although it was an awkward scene with an ex-husband, his ex-wife, and their child, an eight year old boy, showing the condominium to us. The boy had made fresh chocolate chip cookies to demonstrate the fine craftsmanship of the kitchen and modern appliances recently installed. The ex-husband was an electrician so the condo was wired with audio cable for speakers throughout and he had also installed lighting in a ceiling.

It is hard not to look at someone else’s perfectly staged living space and think to yourself – wow why can’t I live like this. Just seeing some of the appurtenances of their living space made me want to improve our little world. Some of the things that they had were fixable in our world. Like they have a wooden block cut-out of their son’s name on the door for the child painted creatively. We could make one of those for Madeline’s room. The modern stove would be a big step up for us since our attempt to make cookies last night wasn’t quite as successful with the stove where I first need to light it from below and then it doesn’t have very even heating. The egg timer we used didn’t alert me in time before I burned the bottoms of the cookies.

But some things just can’t be changed where we are living. We only have one bathroom and it would take a massive reconstruction to add a second one. We aren’t going to be able to install that working wood fireplace that was running in their dining room. We aren’t going to be having a dining room either since we only have two bedrooms and a living room. And even if we do choose to put a Weber grille in the open courtyard of the condo or smuggle one onto the roof we still won’t have a porch in the back where we can grille a steak, burger, sausages, or vegetarian tofu medley in the summer.

So I think it was good to see how other people live. We aren’t going to be putting a bid on the $650K condo since it actually is not much bigger than our space and we weren’t serious about moving just yet. On Sunday Sarah has already scheduled us to have a private viewing of a condo that costs $970K and is twice the size of our place just down the street on St. Paul. We also are unlikely to want to purchase that but we do want to know what that kind of money will get you in this neighborhood of ours.

Maybe I should put a grill in the back yard this summer?