Our Home Isn't Ready for the Holidays without a Keg-a-rator

When we moved to Minnesota from Texas, we didn't have a long time to look at houses. We'd been out to visit family the year before and were contemplating moving our tiny company to some place where we could have an office that would cost less, but would still be around people who were familiar with working with the Fruit. Since obviously Silicon Valley and Austin aren't cost saving towns, that left the Twin Cities, where a rather third-party Fruit-based software vendor resides.

We drove around downtown Minneapolis, downtown St. Paul, the burbs to the west, the burbs to the south and east, until X-man was ready to throttle us. What we found were that places that gave us "best places to live in Minnesota" really weren't our vibe. They were filled with planned subdivisions where houses looked the same -- and there were a lot of them. So many, really that if you were to have a fun night somewhere and need to pick out your house for a Lyft driver after a few Lift Bridge beers, you might not get it right.

We decided that Minneapolis was more like Austin in that it was filled with a lot of hipsters. We were looking for something that had a little land to it, so we didn't have to drive or seek out green space. A house where we could throw a ball for Lily with the flinger. :-)

At the same time, I preferred the vibe of St. Paul. It was quirky and diverse. It was less Fortune 500 businesses, and a lot more colleges. There are so many with campuses just a mile or two apart  it's like they meld together. I totally liked that. Downtown was easy to get around, and they have an On Your Honor train system in the Cities that I found to be a hoot. (What do you mean there's no turnstiles to go through and I just flash my ticket or my app on my phone if someone asks?)

So we ended up spending a lot of time touring the East Metro area. I liked Stillwater best. But it was a lot of added commute time, but Woodbury felt like it had no soul. So we ventured out into the country and found a small community of homes all on at least 2 acres. We decided if we could find something like that with a house in decent shape (Mactroll only likes new houses) we would be okay. Plus, he was super excited that there was a keg-a-rator in the basement. So if you head our way -- we currently have Fat Tire and Farm Girl on tap. That's right. We have two house beers.

A year later, when our business sold. He few up to Minnesota for meetings and I sent him six houses that were currently on the market. He hated all of them except one, which he decided felt "homey" but was 20 years old and needed some work. It was the house I'd liked best online, too. So we put an offer on it. I never saw it with my own two eyes, but it's our 7th home together. Mactroll knows what he's looking for.

Now we're spending time making the house our own. We've had to put some bucks into fixing some things that had been ignored far too long. Or that were built to code, but Minnesota winter gave code the middle finger and created ice dams. Sexy things like spray insulation, and a new water softener.

Oooh fun fact! When your husband spends years itching his skin all the time, seeing dermatologists and allergists and applying various steroidal creams for twenty years that only work in the short term and then one day it suddenly stops two weeks after you put in a Culligan water softener -- that's a like winning the freaking lottery. Mactroll -- sensitive skin -- needs softer water to exist than normal people.

It was the best money we've spent so far. :-)