It's Always Either Or

We have come to realize that all the places we like that are at the max of our budget all need work. The places we can easily afford though, don't need fixing, but they all suck.

Our agent got us interested in a house that was $280,000. It was an estate and she thought we may be able to get it for even cheaper. She said it had a good yard. She said it didn't need fixing up. She said we could just buy it now, wait for James to finish school, wait for the bigger bucks to start rolling in and then sell it. We could then buy our dream house and have the finances to afford the fixes. We went and looked.

She was right. It didn't need fixing. Except for that one corner of the stairs in the garage where the previous cat had urinated so much it had rotted. The layout was awful. There was a room right as you entered that if it had only been twice as big would have been great. It had a wall of book shelving. Then there was the master bedroom. Hi! Welcome to our house! Here's our messy bedroom for every person at the door to see. The kitchen was a joke. It was like a studio apartment size. The ceilings were mega high though. That was nice. It had this room off the kitchen and dining room that could have been a playroom but it needed to be 3 times as big for us. The two other bedrooms were fine. The laundry room was fine. The backyard had 6 huge apple trees. It wasn't that big. Once I had my garden installed, plus the 6 trees there would be no backyard. I did not have the heart to cut down old apple trees.

James was so exhausted from looking at so many houses he was ready to buy it. I was horrified. I said point blank I hated it. He is ready to give up the search. He told me later that it was just such a relief to find a house that didn't need any work done to it that he wanted to buy it for that reason alone. I understood his point. But if we bought that house we would live across the street from an ugly pink house, in a neighborhood of ugly houses and have no yard. Let alone a house with an awkward layout and dinky stupid rooms.

So we left. We went and got soup and turkey sandwiches. We ate down at the water and decided that we wanted a house with a view of the water where we could see the sunset. As if our standards weren't high enough already!