Requirements for our home

Our dream home would be in Arlington or Lexington, be a 2 floor colonial with a full basement, and about 3/4 of an acre of land. Basically, Ratri wants to live in her parents house, but up here. We're looking to buy early in 2009, with the hopes of moving in the early summer. Prices are coming down, and we're not afraid of an ugly bathroom, or a house that needs the rooms painted, or other cosmetic issues we can deal with. As long as it's structurally sound, and doesn't need major construction, we're not afraid of a fixer-upper. Here's a quick list of what we'd like. Obviously, the need column denotes our basic requirements. Anything less, and we'd rather look elsewhere. The want column is things we'd like to have, and may be in our price range, but falling short of those isn't a deal-breaker. The dream column is our ideal house, and probably more expensive than we can afford right now, but who knows? With foreclosures and the housing market doing what it is, it's possible we could find at least some of these in our price range.

House	Need	Want	Dream
Bedrooms	3	4	4+
Bathrooms	2	2.5	3+
Parking	2 off-street	2 garage	2.5+ garage
Fireplace	no	1	1+
Acres	.25	.33-.5	1
Basement	none	full	full, partially finished

Other Criteria

• Some amount of nasty colors and stuff like that is acceptable - we expect to potentially repaint quite a few rooms.
• Kitchen must have an appropriate structural layout to accommodate two cooks.
• Garage should be large enough that you can actually walk between the cars. Crazy.
• Heating system that is NOT forced hot air
• Good placement of electrical outlets, particularly in the kitchen and bathrooms.
• Plentiful grounded outlets.
• Decent closet space in the bedrooms, coat closet somewhere near the entrance.
• Flat driveway, with a particular eye towards shovelability. No major puddles on the driveway when it rains. (Major being, for example, volume in excess of a cubic foot of water, e.g. 2' x 3' x 2")

Early search results

We've been looking on a few websites, incluiding Zillow and Zip Realty and have found a few potential places, or at least evidence that there are houses in places we'd like to live that are in our price range.

Latest Developments

Seems we're ignoring our own criteria. We found a house in Belmont (A couple of miles from UC) that's got two bedrooms, one bathroom, and is on 7000 square feet of land (.16 acres), and we made an offer on it, that was accepted. It does have two fireplaces...also, a 1-car garage and two additional parking spaces...

Details:

• 232 Brighton Street
• Belmont, MA 02478
• MLS# 70883870
• Hardwood floors
• Oil heat & hot water (Tankless)
• Central air