House Hunting

Several of our friends have asked about our house search since I blogged about my potential dream house last week. We went out to look at it with the real estate agent just a couple of days later, and while the property was beautiful, the inside of the house didn't turn out to be our dream home. I have to admit I was so disappointed and depressed! Despite the fact that the house is actually a couple of years newer than the house we live in now, it was remarkably dated. The layout was very odd, with a not so masterful master bedroom right off the living room--so strange. When you walked into the front door you were kind of standing right in the dining room, which we also thought was very weird. We found ourselves talking about how we could knock out walls and reconfigure the entire first floor to make it usable space for us. It made my stomach hurt just thinking about all the work that would entail.

All that work might be worth it if the location of this house were just slightly better. It's just a tad bit too close to I-70 to be worth it to me. You can actually see the Interstate from the front porch. It was oddly quiet and I think you could plant some large trees to block the view, but it's still a little less than ideal. Unfortunately, there were also some pretty trashy trailer homes also within view of the front porch, which pretty much sealed that house's fate for me. Call me a snob, but I can't have my dream house so nearby neighbors who have so much crap all over their yard!!

Anyway, we went and looked at another house on Monday, but this one made the first house look fabulous. It was on a gorgeous 20 acres with a beautiful view, and the outside of the house was quite charming. Inside, however, the builders tried to make it look like an old farmhouse, which sounds like a good idea, but it just wasn't functional space! The master bedroom upstairs was so small there's no way our furniture would have even fit!

Anyway, I won't bore everyone with all of the details, but today we went to a few open houses and scoped out a few more properties. One of the open houses we only went to because it was very near the first house we looked at, and we ended up being pleasantly surprised at the quality and layout of the home. Unfortunately, the rural subdivision it's in (only 5 acre lots) have a building covenant that would prevent us from actually housing more than a few dogs on the property! Oh well--the house gave us lots of good ideas!

We're going to check out a few more open houses tomorrow, and we've called a couple of other agents about other listings we're interested in. A few look like they might have some potential, but I'm not holding my breath--I think the house search is going to be a very long process!!