Therefore, you guys will never be able to see how extremely horrific and shocking the interior of the house we went to see on Saturday was. So, I’ll try to put it into words instead…

Nicole’s Tips for Successful House Hunting:

~ You should be suspicious when you see six exterior photos of a house. There’s a reason they’ve spent the time and money listing photos of just the exterior.

~ When you can smell the musty stench of the basement while walking around the outside of the house, it’s probably not going to get any better on the inside.

~ Realtors are able to flat out lie about the conditions of a house in their listing. For example:

1. “Bathroom needs replaced” could actually mean that the kitchen also has been torn apart (so the “kitchen needs replaced”), that there are scattered linoleum tiles all over the main floor in the living and dinning rooms (so the “flooring needs replaced”) and also that there are gapping holes in several of the walls (so the “dry wall needs replaced”).

2. “One and a half bath” could actually mean that there is a large room on the main floor with a toilet and sink in it.

3. Conversely, “three bedrooms” could also mean that the bedroom on the first floor is supposed to be the same large room that has a toilet and a sink sitting in it.

If this house had been properly priced (for $50,000-70,000 less would be a good start) or marked as a “handyman special” we wouldn’t have wasted our time going to see it. We’re excited about fixing a little place up, but we aren’t professionals!

Such a disappointment. Honestly, the place needs to be burnt down. I doubt if you striped it down to it’s bare bones if you’d have anything to work with!

So, where does that leave us? A bit depressed, a bit confused. We don’t know where God is leading us, but thankfully there’s one thing we do know: He’s trustworthy and where ever the road ahead of us does lead, there are good things along it…

Anyway, this house has a lot of little things about it that I like. It’s Cape Cod-ish, front porch, long yard, a half bath. It will most likely need a bit of work, but I’m willing to put in a reasonable about of work. I like work (you know, the Martha Stewart kind). It all depends on how much of that sort of work are we talking about here…

The house is in York County, Pennsylvania (which is one of the reasons why we can afford it). Travis’ company recently left the Baltimore area and moved up to York. The commute is about 50 minutes for Travis. Not fun. Especially when we moved here to this apartment because it was only 3 miles away from the office.

So, we’re looking at different possibilities in outside of York. We looked at some nice and reasonably priced apartments but they were so nice and so reasonably priced that no one was moving out of them any time soon. So, we’re going to see if this is a door that God is opening up for us instead.

Rather exciting! We’ll see what happens.