Parade of Homes 2012

This past weekend, my wife and I went to see the Cache Valley Parade of Homes. It was the first time I had been to one of these since I was in my teens and my mom took me to see some of the ones in the northern Utah parade that was going on at the time. I don't remember much from those, but it was really interesting to go to this one.

One of the main differences between then and now is that I am now at a point in my life that I am looking into what I would want to have, design-wise, in my future home. We have now lived in three different apartments since we have been married and are starting to get a feel for what we both want. I am thankful that we actually seem to have pretty similar tastes in what we would like. We seemed to agree on the houses we liked overall and were also in agreement on what houses we really didn't care for.

Now, I won't bother you with the details of the few houses that we didn't care for. However, the house that we liked the best was called "The Sarah" (Funny coincidence, huh?). It seemed to have some of the best qualities that we were looking for. As an example, we would like to have both an upper and a lower family room. My wife had something similar as she was growing up and likes the way that it worked out for her family. The main floor family room moved right into the kitchen which she was very impressed with. Normally, she doesn't care for the greatroom idea, but this had enough space, and the setup worked out well enough that there seemed to be a separation between the two that worked for her. There was a dining area off of the kitchen area and outside was a very large covered deck that could easily be used for an outside dining area.

There were plenty of bedrooms. Obviously, we wouldn't need them to begin with, but we liked that aspect. One of my favorite features was the fact that when you came up to the top floor, for some reason, it didn't feel as if we were on the top floor. There was a large landing at the top of the stairs that made the area feel open and large. And, the master bedroom was just awesome! ...At least we liked it.

The only drawback, that I was seeing, was the unfortunate number of box elder bugs that had decided to perch themselves on the many large windows. I loved the windows though, because of the amount of natural light that they allowed in. We have been without this for the majority of our full year-and-a-half of marriage and is always a plus when we see this feature.

All in all, a great way to spend our Saturday. These homes were beautiful! We are glad that others will be living in a few of them and not us, but, I'm sure that others will feel the same about the house that we will eventually build. It will be ours and we will be happy with it.