Saturday, May 10, 2008

Big Sigh

Finding a house is hard, especially when you know you can't have a huge monthly payment because of all of your other bills.

This morning was...interesting:
  • I saw one SUPER pretty place. The downside: it's a townhouse, and I could faintly hear the other people walking up and down their stairs. Also, because of the big front yard, the backyard is a little shared brick courtyard. Where would the chickens live?! And, finally, I wouldn't really call the neighborhood transitional just yet. Still boarded up buildings and falling down places....no where to really walk.
  • The mixed use building that I looked at was gross, gross, gross. Ugh.
  • The other work/live place that was recently rehabbed is just WEIRD with multiple add-ons and sloping floors and odd bathroom configurations...among other things.
  • One house would have been super-great, but it was a half-assed rehab job. Things would definitely be going wrong soon. Also, the backyard was all paved.
  • The place I was most excited about looked okay in person...I just had issues with the condition of the wood floors, and there were little details that hadn't been finished. Like the closets didn't have rails or shelves. Some trim work needed to be finished more neatly, and some caulking was coming off around the bathtub. Also, the showing was generally weird because my realtor and I discovered that someone had stolen all of the kitchen appliances (dishwasher, stove, microwave, and refrigerator) (and scratched up the wood floor in the process of carting them out)! It was a bit awkward when the seller's agent came over because he was trying to tell me about other properties, and we were just like, dude, someone stole all of the appliances here - shouldn't you call the police or something. We determined it had to be an inside job because there were no signs of forced entry. The back door had been taken off its hinges, but that had been done from the inside. Someone totally knew the lockbox code.
So, I continue looking.

I mean, I like the place with the stolen appliances and it's right in my price range, so maybe I could just write some stuff in the contract for them to fix.

2 comments:

bek said...

"I like the place with the stolen appliances..." You don't hear that too often. I feel you on the difficulty of house-hunting -- good luck! And post pics when you make your decision...so that I can be happy for you from afar :)

BethD said...

CB! I want to live vicariously through your house hunting! PLZ Send me links to places you are looking at. I just want to SEE! Last weekend I went on a Bungalow home tour. http://www.bungalowclub.org/index.html
I have a slogan, "2009, a bungalow is mine".