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It sounds lovely. I know I'd jump for a house like that.

God, why do I have to live in such an expensive place. That house is lovely. It would be listed and taxed at almost twice the amounts shown if it was here in NJ.

Looks like a very cool house. From the front I'd have no idea it's as huge as it is!

Yeah... very deceiving. And even cooler is that the house has no hallways (which is why it seems so big for the stated square footage)- the rooms open right onto each other- there are a lot of little nooks in corners of rooms to make them fit. Lots of little surprises.

This is the other home we looked at. Much bigger. A stairway from the kitchen goes to the upstairs bedroom which was obviously a maid/nanny room. It's a lot like the house that you would picture in Mary Poppins or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Not a mansion at 2500 square feet, but very comfortable.

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These homes are in the Fairmount Historic District in Fort Worth, which they claim is the largest historic district in the southwest. As such, colors, fences, remodeling, etc., all have to be as historically accurate as possible. It was full of drug houses and bordellos 20-30 years ago but is turning into such an awesome area. It's like living in a museum. We want in.

I like them both, but really like the second one!

Here's another gem that I haven't been inside yet. Again... look at how big the front porch is.

At the north end of this neighborhood is Magnolia Avenue which was recently put on a "street diet" to reduce the number of motor traffic lanes to add in bike lanes, and has a great, eclectic collection of restaurants and shops. They had an alternative art show yesterday (as opposed to the larger Main Street Art Festival) where local artists displayed their favorite works instead of the politically correct art for a more mainstream audience. And the beer was free- donated by a local brewery and distributor.

I love this town.

Also... if you click on the listings and scroll down to the OVERHEAD MAPS section, you can see Street View and Birdseye View for the house and surrounding neighborhood. You can see it's not uniformly storybook and that a lot of the houses need work, but this is an old city neighborhood that is coming back up fast.

I was just in OKlahoma City and really enjoyed seeing so, so many homes of this style and vintage. The low bungalow is so comfortable for Southern/Southwestern weather, shady and porchy, and the construction of the time is solid. There's a sheltering graciousness to this kind of architecture. We have a few houses like this on the East Coast, but not the same density. The housing stock is so much older, and the things you see in Texas - Spanish colonial revival, missionesque, bungalow, 19210s-20s-30s is much rarer here.

Yeah, that and the prices. I was looking at home prices in OKC for homes like this -- $179K, $185K. Unheard of. Out here, you could get a trailer for that. Or maybe an older condo. Not a house with 3 bedrooms and a half acre.

Fort Worth is one of those best kept secrets. The home prices never jump fast around here, and since the economy tanked they haven't dipped too much either.

Part of it in the South.Southwest is just that there's a shit-ton of housing, a surplus really, compared to the population. Whereas on the East Coast there's pretty much always a housing crunch, which drives values up. There's less available housing and most land is built out. In other regions, zoning is much more forgiving, sprawl can continue sprawling because municipal boundaries are so freaking huge, and there's more housing than people - this lack of combined pressures on housing stock keeps prices lower.

I love the second one! That fireplace! The dark wood!

None of those are my cup of tea by any stretch, but they all look very comfy and liveable. Those prices are fucking awesome, too! USD187k is AUD193 and, for that in my city, you might get a two-bedroom apartment that needs a lot of renovation. Maybe. For a four-bedroom house, you wouldn't even start looking at below AUD400k. We have that running-out-of-land thing going on, coupled with a city that every man and his dog wants to move to (~1,000 people a month move here from interstate). Add to that strict limits on population density and a new state-wide plan that stops the suburbs from sprawling much beyond the present limits of development approvals and you've got a recipe for expensive real estate.

Good luck with your search for a new home - looking early is one of the keys to success, in my opinion, because then you have a good idea of what places are worth and can jump when you find the perfect place, knowing that you are making a sound decision.

I like the first one best, although that floor in the second one with the parquet radiating outwards from the centre is cool.

And, as dg said, the prices! For a 4-bed house round here you'd be looking at no less than £650,000, or about a million bucks.

Senyar- the first one has hardwood floors throughout, although not patterned like in the second one.

That first one is a total cutie!

Nice, I had no idea that Dallas was that affordable. Those prices are about what you'd pay here in Pittsburgh but we always think that we've got the cheapest real estate in the union.

Not sure that they would qualify as historic around here though, those are new houses from my perspective.

Ummmm... this is Fort Worth, not Dallas. Life's too short to live in Dallas.

Life's too short to live in Dallas.

I feel like these could be plain old good words to live by, even if you are currently living ~1600 miles from Dallas.