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To unpack my previous post a little:
We found a home in Saratoga Springs. It has a fireplace. A fireplace.
The ad we called about was for a split-level apartment in a nice Victorian home, but we wound up in a brick outbuilding near the main house—it could be a carriage house, a barn, who knows? Whatever it was, we liked it more, and were willing to pay a little extra for it. We're on the second floor, and our apartment fills the space beneath the high peaked roof, which means we'll need to figure out how to hang posters on a 45° angle. The ceiling in the living room goes all the way to the peak (20 feet, perhaps?) with exposed beams, skylights, bright white walls, and the fireplace. A ladder leads up to a little loft, where I'll have my office; the two bedrooms and bathroom look east over a lovely cemetery, which means we'll be the first to go when the dead walk. ( Here are some pictures, artistic merit not included. )
If you want to look at the map I mentioned, switch it to satellite and zoom all the way in. The pin points at the main house; our building is the little one southeast of it, across the parking area. You can see the cemetery behind us; scrolling up a little, you can see Congress Park a block north of us, with footpaths and duck ponds and fountains. The north border of the park is the southern border of the downtown area; a block and a half directly north of the northwest corner of the park, along that wide boulevard (Broadway, which runs all the way to Broadway in NYC), is Borders, which I have mentally marked as one center of town. (If you want to find it, the roof is a black 3x4 rectangle, with a pattern of six gray dots on it.) It's about half a mile from our front door. In addition, we found two used book stores, and there's something called the "Saratoga Sci Fi Shop" near our house, which I have yet to investigate. A nice change from Oberlin, if not quite Ann Arbor's book density.
That said, Saratoga Springs was eerily reminiscent of downtown Ann Arbor—the upscale parts, minus the funky parts. I don't expect to find hippies playing guitar in the parks, smoky crowded bars where Man or Astro-Man? plays, independent theaters with torn seats and dirty carpets (*ahem*), but there's no shortage of nice restaurants, coffee shops, quirky boutiques. There were a number of times I was half-sure I was looking at familiar vistas from Ann Arbor. It should be a great place to live. ( See here. )
We found a home in Saratoga Springs. It has a fireplace. A fireplace.
The ad we called about was for a split-level apartment in a nice Victorian home, but we wound up in a brick outbuilding near the main house—it could be a carriage house, a barn, who knows? Whatever it was, we liked it more, and were willing to pay a little extra for it. We're on the second floor, and our apartment fills the space beneath the high peaked roof, which means we'll need to figure out how to hang posters on a 45° angle. The ceiling in the living room goes all the way to the peak (20 feet, perhaps?) with exposed beams, skylights, bright white walls, and the fireplace. A ladder leads up to a little loft, where I'll have my office; the two bedrooms and bathroom look east over a lovely cemetery, which means we'll be the first to go when the dead walk. ( Here are some pictures, artistic merit not included. )
If you want to look at the map I mentioned, switch it to satellite and zoom all the way in. The pin points at the main house; our building is the little one southeast of it, across the parking area. You can see the cemetery behind us; scrolling up a little, you can see Congress Park a block north of us, with footpaths and duck ponds and fountains. The north border of the park is the southern border of the downtown area; a block and a half directly north of the northwest corner of the park, along that wide boulevard (Broadway, which runs all the way to Broadway in NYC), is Borders, which I have mentally marked as one center of town. (If you want to find it, the roof is a black 3x4 rectangle, with a pattern of six gray dots on it.) It's about half a mile from our front door. In addition, we found two used book stores, and there's something called the "Saratoga Sci Fi Shop" near our house, which I have yet to investigate. A nice change from Oberlin, if not quite Ann Arbor's book density.
That said, Saratoga Springs was eerily reminiscent of downtown Ann Arbor—the upscale parts, minus the funky parts. I don't expect to find hippies playing guitar in the parks, smoky crowded bars where Man or Astro-Man? plays, independent theaters with torn seats and dirty carpets (*ahem*), but there's no shortage of nice restaurants, coffee shops, quirky boutiques. There were a number of times I was half-sure I was looking at familiar vistas from Ann Arbor. It should be a great place to live. ( See here. )
