After looking at several areas in New York we decided to look for a waterfront house in Rochester NY. Everyone was excited to look at houses. Ana was so happy at taking a nighttime car ride (we left our house at 5:30 AM so it as still dark). The trip was around 5 ½ hours each way. Rochester NY has a population around 250,000 people but, the houses we looked at were away from the center of the town, so we did not see many shops or places to go. This was the second family trip to upstate NY, the first was a two years ago when we went to Niagara Falls.
We had four houses scheduled to look at. Two of the houses we planned to see were sold before we could see them. Out of the four we picked three of them were on a lake or pond with water views.
The first house was different, it was on Lake Ontario and there was a garage across the street, leading to Long Pond. We were told you could see sunrise from the lake and sunset on the pond. The master bedroom had a great view of the lake, and had two other bedrooms. The living room was large and had an extra room we would use for an office on the first floor.
The basement was under 6 feet in height, I could not stand up. The kitchen needed updating, and most of the flooring needed to be replaced. Most of the rooms also needed paint, and the house was overpriced.
The second house was on Long Pond close to the first house. The house was updated with a new kitchen, flooring, and paint. This house also had large windows overlooking the pond. The pond was quite with no waves compared to Lake Ontario. This house had a balcony connected with two of the bedrooms with another great view of the pond.
The problem with this house is no extra room for an office, and no place for Bryna’s green screen for filming. Without a basement this would limit our storage and options for an office.
The third house was in Ontario NY with a population of 10,000 people. Ontario NY is at least 30 minutes drive to most of the things we would like to do, even the hospital or Walmart was over 30 minutes away. This house had three bedrooms and a full basement. The basement even had a kitchen with a separate entrance. This could be used as a separate apartment, or and office and space for the green screen.
The problem with the house was it needed too many updates. It was by far the most beat-up house we had seen. The only good part was the water views, and it had a full basement. The kitchens needed to be replaced, along with some repaired. The living room was long but narrow limiting our options. The bedrooms were odd shapes with strange looks that it would be hard to find a use for. The entire basement needed to be gutted and start over from scratch.
The musician’s house was the best kept house we looked at. The neighborhood looked nice. This house had three bedrooms and an office. Everything in this house was nicely done with new floors and kitchen. The basement was converted to a music studio and man cave. They even had a sound booth for recording studio, a bar, hot tub, large backyard, and even a barber shop.
The problem was we had decided Rochester was not the right area for us. The other problem was we needed to place a bid within two hours, and we were not ready to commit that fast to an area we didn’t know. However, the house was beautiful but not when you have to make a life changing decision in two hours.
Overall, we learned a lot, this was the first houses we looked at, and even though we did not explore the area much we decided Rochester NY was not the right place for our happy family. If you want to see more of our family trip to upstate NY, please click on the video below.
