I’m not sure where I first heard the term “real estate porn,” but it’s been an apt description of what I’ve been doing for the last few weeks. Searching postings on Craigslist, meeting with apartment locators, posting my own ad on Craigslist, but mostly just ogling delicious, heady combinations of granite counter tops, brushed nickel fixtures, various floorplans and square footages and mostly realizing that I’ll never have it all…or at least not in the next fourteen days.
Now, I’ve lived in the same apartment for two years, and I haven’t exactly made it my own. In fact, I’ve been living in apartments and houses for approximately twelve years, and I’ve never hung a picture on a wall. I’ve framed a few and left them around on mantels and bookshelves, but with a nail and a doodad and a hammer? Not one. But when I get ready to move, and change and real estate are on my mind, I get a little Martha Stewart-y in my brain. This is the apartment where I’ll decide upon a theme for my bathroom! And maybe I’m fooling myself, but finally, at 33, I’m thinking I might actually do it for real this time. Because I have some money to spare, and I have taken some photos I like and want to display. And I’ve discovered a few websites that have cute design and style ideas that don’t seem über complicated or overly dependent on floral patterns.
I’ve also been feeling the drive to be in a house rather than a massive apartment complex, too. One of the things I loved about living in Hyde Park years ago was that it was a neighborhood. You could walk around and look at cute little houses and bungalows, and it had personality and character. So, I’ve been looking at tons of real estate websites, and I stumbled across a housing development that I’d actually seen and found interesting before. One day, when I was feeling a little restless at home, I took a drive to photo graph a “cubist neighborhood” on the outskirts of Austin. It’s still very much being developed, and there was construction on a few new homes, and there’s a lot of open space to grow and develop, but that hasn’t happened yet. I’m embedding links to some of my favorite pictures, and you can check out the rest by clicking on the link to my Flickr page. They are in a set labeled Agave Cubist Neighborhood.
Little Square Houses All in a Row
Not All Cubist Homes are Square
But Many of Them Are Very Square
