Saturday, February 14, 2009

House hunting: My thoughts

I have decided that a process that should be exciting and wonderful is instead annoying and stressful. When we house hunted to find this place it wasn't nearly as bad though this house, somehow, I picked this one to look at really early on and Pete agreed on it as well...it was semi-miraculous.

This time we are having a slightly more difficult time as our list of needs has changed and it can be hard to find everything. Examples? 3+ bedrooms 2+ baths (in the teen years I am not sharing a bathroom with my daughter that will spend more time on her make up and hair than it takes me to make a 5 course meal)...seems easy right? Add to that a 2+ car garage and ideally a basement...okay, still with me? Now add on keeping it in our price range and ideally the same area we are in now. Yea, not so simple anymore is it?

So I drive around looking for houses, they are *everywhere* apparently everyone is selling and no one is buying...shocker! I use my mind and jot down the places and the real estate agency its listed with to look it up later...3/4 of the places I found that I wanted to look into more I can't locate online, THAT is annoying.

So then I find houses that I wanna look at. Yay! I talk to Pete and he wants to look at them too. Excellent. So I bother the real estate agent *yet again* and let her know we want to see these places and we are left to figure out when to see them. Shouldn't be a problem right? Wrong. Between Pete's work, the kids schedules, the poor real estate agent's busy life (after reading my incessant emails) AND the fact its better to see houses in daylight which there is SO little of in Vermont during the month of February, makes it rather hard to schedule things.

Then of course the FUN part happens we were stress and hmmm and haw at what to offer for a place we like and if we should really offer a price and how high/low to go and what if the seller doesn't like the price and blah blah blah...then inspections and surveys and all that crap. Then...oh man, then comes the WORST part of all! Packing up all this crap and boxing it up to move it to a new place and figure out where to put it all when we get there.

In the end will it be worth it? Most likely. I will get a real house with enough car space and hopefully a nice fenced in (or fenceable) yard where I can toss the children and the dog I will someday have...a real house I can paint and do whatever I want to with and really settle in and enjoy it and build memories in. I mean really, wouldn't it be cool if Ivy's first steps are at our new house that we spend the next 40+ years of our lives? It will be a little sad to leave this house because of the memories of Aaron growing up but those memories will come with us of course...

Now I am just rambling, I need to watch the end of Lost that I started.

1 comment:

Jenny said...

I know exactly what you mean! It can be super stressful househunting!