North Carolina Nesties
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Great places to live around Raleigh?
We live in Northern Virginia and are thinking a job related move to the Raleigh area might happen in the next year or so. We would be looking for a nice suburban area with good schools. If you love where you live can you tell me about it?
Re: Great places to live around Raleigh?
DH and I live in South Raleigh (north of Fuquay Varina, south of Garner) and love it. Before that, we lived in Cary. Although we liked it, we got more bang for our buck where we are now. It's peaceful and everyone is very friendly. When we first moved into your neighborhood, we were somewhat caught off-guard that everyone waved.
However, if your job is going to be in north Raleigh then I probably wouldn't recommend where we live. The commute could be an hour depending on your commute time.
Most of the Triangle is great though... Cary, Apex, Holly Springs, Wake Forest, Fuquay-Varina.
Just look around and explore, there are a lot of great areas/neighborhoods in the Triangle. I would be most concerned with Southeast Raleigh/Garner (the part of Garner north of highway 70) than South Raleigh. South Raleigh is more rural, but it is definitely growing. When I'm at home, I feel like I'm away from everything, which could be good or bad depending on what you like. DH and I feel more safe where we are now than when we are in Cary, but our neighborhood had pretty much everything to do with it. In our two years in Cary, I saw more police cars in our subdivision than I have anywhere else that I've lived in the Triangle, hence the reason we moved. Cary is great though! Lots of people love it. I probably miss the convenience the most. All cities/towns have their bad parts though.
As far as getting to places.... we're about 5 minutes from the grocery store and 20 minutes from shopping. I work near downtown and it takes me about 25-30 minutes to get to work.
We also looked in Apex and Holly Springs and liked those areas too, but wanted a little more land.
Good Luck with your search!
I live in Wake Forest (which is near N. Raleigh) and I LOVE it. I wouldn't live anywhere else, well if I could afford a really nice house in the heart of North Raleigh, I would live there. My favorite North Raleigh zip codes to search for homes were 27615, 27614, 27613, 27612. We could not afford the size of a new home in N. Raleigh that we ended up with in WF. I live just over the Raleigh line into Wake Forest (27587). The schools here are good, the area is booming and there is a ton to do, places to eat. It is about a 25 min drive to downtown as well.
I worked in Cary and we looked at homes and put in an offer there, the home prices are higher and I always found it to be very congested, but it is a great town with good schools.
This. Although our jobs are both currently in N. Raleigh, if we changed in the future and they ended up in Cary, RTP, Durham, or Chapel Hill, it wouldn't increase the commute a lot b/c we're in the corner of Raleigh closest to those cities. I love our location, we're within a mile of a park, library, and schools. It's a 5 minute drive to several grocery stores, Lowes, Target, etc. Though we definitely could have bought an equivilent home for less money in S.Raleigh or an outlying town, it is worth it (to us) to have a higher mortgage payment in a location that requires less car time.
Of the places pp's have mentioned, I don't think I could ever live in Wake Forest (sorry dbert!). The commute would drive me nuts since there aren't a ton of roads to/from W.F., all of them are 2 lane except one 4-lane that has a ton of stoplights. They all seem to be quite congested during the morning/evening commutes. It might work OK if you can work at hours of your choosing and go to & leave work early, but I wouldn't want to count on that. It's a cute town w/ nice homes and a lot of convenience to stores/restaurants, but it just wouldn't be worth it to me to deal w/ that kind of commute. If I were going to chose a town that outlies Raleigh or Cary, I would probably chose Holly Springs or Apex b/f WF. Holly Springs & Apex have access to 4 lane highways that have much fewer stoplights.
They are currently in the process of expanding 98 and Falls, including adding a new connector rd (called New Falls) and making it 4 lanes, the rd is already dug up!! The part by my house is called the 98 bypass and part of Falls is already 4 lanes. It isn't going to be complete until 2013 but it already has made my life easier! When I did commute to Cary it was 25min with NO traffic and about 45 with traffic. My husband works in RTP and it takes him about 40 minutes. It was worth the trade off to us because we got a 2500sq ft house that was new with 4 bedrooms and a bonus room for about $20000 less than we found anywhere else!
ETA: And it afforded us the luxury of me being able to SAH because we had a lower payment!
While we love living in North Raleigh, I will say that Wake Forest is our fall-back plan if we need to save a bit so I can SAH (if we choose to go that route). Dbert is 100% right that you can get a lot of house for the money, but you will be looking at a longer commute depending on where you are working obv. Right now we decided to have a smaller house for location, but if I found out tomorrow that I'm having twins (we always joke about this) then we'd be moving to Wake Forest. I think it just comes down to how important is location, how long are you willing to commute, and how much house do you need and how much are you willing to pay for it.