"The day you buy the home and the day you sell the home." For the record, I've heard that said about boat ownership, too. My wife's 99 year old home in Massachusetts that we sold two weeks ago required a lot of work to get it ready for sale. I posted about painting the garage, but a house that old just is a money pit. There was always some project the needed attention.

When we started searching in the New York City metropolitan area for a home we had to deal with two types of sticker shock. First was home prices, where a comparable home in Massachusetts would be hundreds of thousands of dollars less. The second type of sticker shock was real estate taxes.  We had to eliminate New Jersey and Long Island from the mix because taxes are out of sight. In fact when a bemoaned this to a colleague, she told that the taxes on her condo in Nassau county were $17,000.  This was a 400% increase over Massachusetts.

As we looked north of New York, we had to rule out Westchester, Putnam, Rockland, Orange and Dutchess counties of the equation . I was looking at a 2 hour commute and that was too much. Home prices in Westchester? Let's just say a one bedroom condo in Westchester cost what we paid for a three bedroom hom in Connecticut.

Finally we found a community in Connecticut that was about 60 miles outside of the city, but an affordable home price (e.g. size for the cost) and tolerable taxes (only twice as much as Massachusetts) were in reach. The commute is about an hour and fifteen minutes if I can grab the express train.

We bought our new home from an estate. The house was built in 1972, and walking into it was like stepping into a time machine. Wall to wall carpeting everywhere, include the downstairs half bath and the kitchen. We've had three contractors come to the house and all have made the same statement about the carpet in the kitchen, "I've been to a lot of homes and you don't see this very often." Like never.

The appliances are all original. If you like avocado green, you love the cooktop, the wall ovens and the sink. Fortunately, the co-executors of the estate removed the copper and orange foil wallpaper that complimented the peach rug in the kitchen.

I was thinking that if we weren't going to live there, we could lease it to the production company that created Mad Men.

Upstairs we removed wall paper from a bedroom (purple tulips), hallway (white calla lilies on a purple background) and guest bathroom (gold foil pattern on a white background).

So while my wife started painting 21st century colors on the walls, I updated the mercury thermostats with electronic programmables ones, and  installed the GFCI outlets throughout the house, we are slowly bringing this home into the present, and ending its past.

We will pulling up the white carpeting; oh I forgot to mention that the owner of this home lived alone well into her 80s and never had pets nor kids nor husband. She would be about the only sane person who would qualify to  install white wall to wall carpets in a home. For a pet owner or parent, white carpets are an exercise in futility, as well as a diminshed mental capacity.

Slowly we're turning this home into our own, and we're still happy about our decision. We took "before" pictures, because no one would believe it.