The power of the Google Maps street view feature.

Andrew and I are in no way, shape, or form, prepared to buy a house...but my boredom often leads me to look at houses on Craigslist. Sometimes I like to look for places in California, Alaska, or Roslyn, Washington (so I can pretend to live in my favorite "Alaskan" town of Cicely), and other times I just check out what's available locally. Last week I just happened to find a cute little house on the lake. It resided at the end of a culdesac and even had access to a private beach. Pretty ideal, right? After realizing that through a number of circumstances there was a crazy possibility that we could actually purchase the house we decided we wanted to go have a look. Knowing only that it was north of Lakeshore Boulevard in Euclid, Ohio I started searching streets on Google Maps using street view and found it in a surprisingly short amount of time. 

The next day we got up fairly early and prepared for our visit. We stopped for breakfast at a Dunkin Doughnuts close to the lake house because Andrew had seen multiple commercials for their new waffle breakfast sandwich and he was convinced it would be awesome. It wasn't. The same could be said for the neighborhood that the cute house was in. It had the necessities, but nothing special. At this point in time I'm not sure that I would trade my local farmer's market, coffee shops, museums and favorite restaurants (all minutes away from our current home) for merely a lake view and a cute house (which could be completely ugly on the inside). 

We finished off the day by picking up an amazingly cheap mid-century dresser that we found on Craigslist. Thanks to Julia and Aaron we were actually able to get it home. Then treated ourselves to great food at Tommy's and some photo booth action at Big Fun. 

Nope, wouldn't trade it for a lake view.