i was incredibly excited to begin our house search last weekend.

that excitement quickly changed to shock, then to horror and finally to depression. house hunting wasn’t nearly as fun as i thought it would be. the houses we chose looked great on paper, but didn’t hold up when we saw them in person.

the first house had no appliances and really no where in the kitchen for appliances to go. it also had apparantly been broken into several times and had copper wire stolen. cross that off the list.

house no. 2 was cute; however, the living room floor was bowed, there was no vent in one of the bedrooms, and the bathroom floor sloped. oh, and there were two kitchen sinks. in the backyard. yes, you read that correctly. next stop, please.

at house no. 3, joe literally took one step inside and told our realtor he wasn’t going any further. it was being sold “as-is” and was in shambles. it was absolutely awful. i was in such shock that on the grading sheets our realtor gave us for each house, i could only write, “yowza”. it was rough.

house no. 4 was really cute. in fact, we loved it. the only drawback was the lack of a dining room (or any room really for my dining room table and china cabinet) and that the only bathroom was in the back of the house. sigh. sadly, we crossed it off our list. it was so cute.

we next made our way five miles down the interstate to emerson, where we thought we may have found a winner. the stats matched what we wanted, and one of the pictures showed the lake. yay, i thought. we will have a lake view. after being stalled by not one, but two stopped trains, we took a different route and finally found ourselves at . . . a mobile home. seriously, folks. and, there was no lake to be seen. i believe that is called false advertising. i was ready to go before we even got out of the car, but we took the obligatory look around before telling our realtor we were ready to go.

at this point, i was starting to get depressed. i know it’s not always easy to find a house, but we had seen such crappy places, i was really starting to think we weren’t going to find anything.

we decided our next stop would be a house that, again, looked cute in its picture, and we found out it was in a cute subdivision right next to our apartment complex. things might be looking up, i thought. we drove up to the house and saw the two words i feared the most: “under contract”. of course. we couldn’t catch a break. we went in anyway to look around, and i got even more depressed because it was cute. it only had two bedrooms, but there was a loft, so there was plenty of room for all of our stuff. sigh.

i was ready to call it a day, but we decided to go by one house that joe and i had disagreed on. i liked the house. joe was wary about the neighborhood. we thought we’d let our realtor be the judge. we pulled up, and she thought the area was fine. actually, the city is working on revitilizing the area, so it probably would have been ok. there wasn’t a lockbox on the door, so we called the seller’s realtor, who told us it was under contract. oh, how i hated those words. he said we could go in anyway, so we took a look around. joe and i both fell in love. it had three bedrooms upstairs, a good sized kitchen, and a huge rec room and another room that could be a bedroom downstairs. why was it that all the good houses were already taken?

luckily, the realtor had another house on the market and, after driving around aimlessly with the incorrect directions our realtor’s gps gave us, we finally arrived and i immediately knew it was the house for us. it was brick, which i wanted, had a large kitchen, three large bedrooms, a fireplace and a deck.

and now, here we are, about to go into a binding contract. it was a whirlwind of a week, one which really opened our eyes to the world of real estate. at least it worked out well in the end. things have a way of doing that.