want to move to PNW, tell me about your city/town

thanks, affordability is an issue. We live in Tampa now and If I have my way we will move in a year or two. MY dh is looking more at three-Five or even more. I can not stay in Florida that long so we will be doing some negotiating. By the time we sell our house we will be able to get anywhere from $250-300 thousand. We have to pay my MIL $25 thousand (she gave us the house). So that plus what is still owed on the house (i don't really know how much I have to ask my DH). But I think we have a decent amount to put down. DH is a plumber/mechanic. How are jobs out there? and what is average for bills?? I am not glued to the area I mentioened. My I'laws whomI LOVE life in Sammamish. Which is to expensive and honestly the houses are just to close together. But it would be nice to be close to them. and the coast is beautiful.

so come on everyone let me hear all the things you love.

ok this is feeding my quest for the PNW. I am devoring information and real estate listings. (and longing to get out of this heat and humidity)

Courtney

oh and places with an accredited college near by are really good b/c i have to convince DH to switch credits over after he uses up his florida prepaid college

Quote:
Well, I've got a different suggestion.

I live in Hayden, Idaho, just north of Coeur d'Alene, Idaho.

I love it because...
* It's beautiful here. Check out the view from my front door from last year (when we actually had snow). Click through, there's 5 of them.
* It's a small town with an awesome library system - the second largest library system in Idaho.
* Rarely much big crime. Our latest 'excitement' was the triple murder and the two missing kids (that are still missing unfortunately). That's a once a decade kind of thing here.
* Affordability. You can get a pretty nice house for under $200K. We got ours for $127K a year and a half ago, and that was because the previous owners didn't update anything and had no idea how to show it (which was good for us!).
* Lots of trees, lakes and bike paths. Lots of paved bike paths. Ds and I go for a ride when it's nice out.
* I can ride my bike to: Dh's work, the grocery store, my midwife's office, the post office, my doctor, the library, the farmer's market and seasonal fruit stand. Those are all within 3.5 miles from our house, and there are bike paths most of the way. I'm also not alone when biking around for errands - it's definitely an outdoorsy kind of place.
* Not crowded - we have space between our neighbor's houses. Although we live in an older section of town - the new tract housing spots have the houses squished together.
* Property taxes aren't too high, and the sales tax is 6.5%.
* The people are nice.
* When the traffic light is yellow, people stop. Yes, they stop. When a cop car or fire truck or ambulance gets close to an intersection, *everybody* stops and waits for them to pass before moving again. People don't try to pull in directly after the emergency folk to get a free pass through the rest of their drive - it's quite polite and orderly. This is what shocked me the most about here - I had gotten used to the red light runners of Spokane (seriously, 8 cars will go through a red light) and horrible college student driving of Pullman and Moscow.

I don't like...
* The fact they put one of the two high school on the back end of the jail. Ds will be homeschooled anyway (at least for his early years), so this doesn't bother me as much as it could.
* That more people are moving here - Kootenai County is one of the fastest growing counties in the US.
* Property values are going up, so it's very possible folks will be priced out of the market in time.
* That Walmart tried to put a SuperCenter within a mile or two of our house. Luckily the residents/voters have to approve it or something like that. Walmart got shot down last time - yay!
* Idaho has income tax, where Washington doesn't (but they do have high property taxes and sales tax that starts at 7.5% and vary by county). Oregon doesn't have sales tax, has income tax, and *really* high property tax. Income/tax wise, our family's got the best deal here in Idaho.

Lanna

Well, I live in North Bend, Washington, which is part of Snoqualmie Valley (Fall City, Snoqualmie, and North Bend).
We LOVE alot about our town! We live "downtown"-even though North Bend is so small it's funny to call it downtown, we have 3 traffic lights- so everything is in walking distance: the grocery, the library (really nice) the second hand baby store (where I got all my nice diaper covers for super cheap!) the movie theater (locally owned, has film festivals, real cheap) the community center and pool, and the somewhat abismal restaurant scene. There is a farmer's market in the summer too.
Also, North Bend is on the Mountains to Sound Greenway so it is right at the foothills of the Cascade Mountains and is a starting point to tons of hikes, if you like that sort of thing.
And it's a straight shot of about 15 minutes to Sammamish (where my dh grew up) if you want to be close to family.

The downside? It's expensive! Because of it's easy access to Seattle and other major towns, the population has exploded, and property prices have too. We bought ours 2 1/2 years ago for $196 and you can't even get a fixer upper for that now! But that is true anywhere in King County now. And there aren't any great parks with playgrounds, although the community center has an indoor play group everyday, and there are a playground-less parks, plus the elementary school will let you use theirs when they aren't. There seems to be tons of families here though, so I think that a good playground is in order!

That's our town! Good luck!

--Grace
Due 6/28 with a :
visit my blog at http://www.myspace.com/11625915

I printed this out and gave it to my DH. (ok after i met him at the car and asked if he was going to keep me here and torture me by staying in this state, and some other stuff that was a little whiny and not very nice to say to the one you love. Although I had ben sitting in an unairconditioned house that was probably like 85-100 degrees and I'm pregnant and i ahve been doing that for two weeks. well longer but the last two weeks have been super hot. It was still wrong I admit that)
anyways, I showed him the print out of this thread, and he read it and came in to talk to me with the map book of Washington!!! and we looked atthe diffrent towns and the ferry routes. He is thinking near Olympia. So then I had told him about a website I found where you can buy foreclosed houses. The nice thing is you get them supersheap b/c the bank just wants there money back they aren't trying to make a profit. The bad you have to pay cash. BUT We can sell our house and have the money to do it. He thinks we can sell the house (once we do some work on it) for 180-230. i told him he was totally low balling it b/c the houses here are going for way more then that. and it was appraised almost three years ago for 210 and values have rising since then. and it's without the work! I mean we are goingt o add another bathroom and that alone soo boosts the value. so then I asked how much we owe on the house and combined with what we have to give his mom it's all in all about 100. (these are all thousands obviousley). That means we can totally do this and he's bending. i mean he wants to be there too, it's just his prepaid but i wonder if you can trade that in for some money.Obviosley you wouldn't get as mich as it's worth in classes but this is so important to me. Just teh thought