? for anyone from Houston/Baytown area pls.

[Nickimouse]

There is a chance our family, DH,myself,DS15 and DS12, could be moving to Texas. My DH job would be in Baytown. Can anyone suggest a family friendly smaller area to live within a 45 minute drive to Baytown.
We would be moving from a small town, my DS15 school only has 500+ students. So something similar (though I wonder if that is possible), would be great! A School with a great music (Band) program is very important.
We also would really like a home with some land. At least an acre.

Thanks in advance for any information you can pass along!

 

[The Mystery Machine]

Well I would start "googling". Alot of Band info can be found on the internet. Bands here are very proud of their students.

As far as "land" it is very expensive here & land is a premium.

I have not been to Houston yet, but good luck on the search!

 

[Jpgirl]

Welcome to Houston!! We moved here 4 years ago and absolutely love it!! The biggest shock will be the size of the school districts here. I'm not sure you're going to find a small district within 45 minutes of Baytown. You see 45 minutes drive time from Baytown isn't going to get you very far out. Traffic is similar to Los Angeles in my opinion. Dh works about 20 miles away and it takes an hour plus to get to work on a lot of days. The Baytown area is ok-not extremely familiar with it. I've heard Clear Lake is nice. We live north in Kingwood but that might be too far for you. When we were looking to move here I picked school districts first then neighborhoods. My criteria was different (smaller district with a good special needs program). Humble ISD only had 2 high schools at the time-now they're opening 2 more. I don't feel like my ds' education was compromised in a bigger school district. We really love Kingwood-over 80 miles of hike/bike trails and community pools in every subdivision. The kids can walk/bike to their elementary schools of the trails but most parents don't let their kids do that . I use the trails to do errand running on my bike (price of gas ) and I've never felt unsafe. The poster before was right about land. We had an acre of woods in Ohio adn a postage size yard here. But we got a bigger house and a pool for less money. I don't mind not having the land as most of our neighbors are not outside people so it's very quiet. You get used to living in close quarters. I actually had more problems with my nosy neighbor in Ohio than I do here. Go to Har.com to look at community locations and houses and you can get the names of school districts and research them. You can also call the schools-they usually have a laison who will meet with you. Dh did this with the 2 finalists and it was invaluable. Also, since I couldn't get down here to house hunt-I would look for houses online and dh would go see them since our realtor was useless. She was a relocator and totally worthless. Anyway we found the house we're in from my searches online. Good luck and feel free to ask away.

 

[brerrabbit]

Welcome to Texas! (if it does happen) Being within 45 minutes of Baytown gives you some options because of a toll road know as Beltway 8 or the Sam Houston Toll Road. Northeast Houston and Kingwood where the previous poster lives are in fact options for you. The other direction or South on the beltway is also an option. The only downside is that South takes you closer to the coast and hurricanes, but around here we don't worry to much about that because they are what they are. I live in Pearland which is a smaller town just south of Houston. Our next door neighbors are Friendswood and Alvin. You might look at Friendswood as their school district is rated fairly well and because of the boundries they have set their high school will never get bigger than 4A. (In Texas schools are classified by the number of students for academic and atheletic compititions, from A to 5A) There are some nice homes in Friendswood. Another area where a lot of people that work in Baytown live is Clear Lake. It is a master planned community developed by Friendswood Development which is owned by Exxon. Kingwood is also a Friendswood Development. They have parks, jogging trails, green spaces and are very nice communities overall. They attend Clear Creek school district and have three high schools that are all 5A.

Definitly use HAR.com, its the MLS listing service for the greater Houston area and you can refine your searches by a lot of different criteria. Good luck and feel free to PM me should you have any questions, I am a native Houstonian and a sixth generation Texan so I have tons of information to share.

 

[Nickimouse]

Thanks so much for the replies! I really appricate it!
I've done some online searching. A little in Kingwood (a few of the school sizes scared me)and Pearland. I will check out the web-sites that were suggested. My parents lived in Clear Lake about 12 years ago for a few years,but I really don't know much about it other than their neighborhood. Our oldest son was born at St. Johns Hospital across from NASA.
We lived in South Carolina for 4 years,so hurricanes don't worry us much.

Thanks so much! I will keep this information in case I need to PM you. Thanks for the offer.