The Hunt Comes to an End

Over the past month, we've looked at several houses. We actually found the perfect place, but the yard was crappy---or I should say, how the house sat on the lot was crappy. Anyway, after that I had a couple of different ideas. I got up one morning and told Butch that what we needed to do was to build THIS house, but tweak it a bit to make it exactly what we want. Then he reminded me of how we'd vowed we'd never build a house because we've seen it happen too often--by the time you're done, you've spent 40% more than you wanted. Don't want to deal with the unknown.

My next idea was to add on to this house---an additional 2 car garage with a studio for me above. Sounds good, but if we do that, then we'll price ourselves out of the neighborhood. Plus, we don't really like our neighborhood anymore anyway.

That left us with continuing the search, or just staying here and forgetting about it. We decided to stay here. Then, of course, after making that decision, our realtor sent me an email about a house in my favorite neighborhood (Northumberland) where there aren't many things available---ever. Figures, just when we make the decision to stop looking, we find something. It sounded absolutely perfect--maybe a tad bigger than we wanted, but everything we were looking for.

The house actually came on the market today and I met my realtor there. The neighborhood is incredible, the house was gorgeous. There were a couple things I didn't like: kind of gaudy---very expensive hand-made furniture, moldings, hand-painting, murals, and gold, "scrolly" fixtures. I'm thinking, well, it might be a shame to "rip out" expensive stuff, but it will have to be done. The other drawback---too many outside doors.

It reminded me of a comment my friend, Nancy made after we moved into this house. We were at the theater one night when she said that she had lain in bed and counted all the ways to get in my house. She wanted to know if that scared me. I said, "well, I hadn't really thought about it, but thank you very much---Butch is out-of-town and I have to go home to a dark, empty house." As it is, I'll discover an unlocked door somewhere and we'll realize that it's been unlocked for weeks! Definitely a problem.

The house I looked at today had probably twice as many doors as this one. They all lead to the gorgeous terrace, formal gardens and pool---beautiful. I reminded myself that it is a gated community, but that many doors still seemed like a drawback.

But--- the KISS of DEATH appeared as we went out onto the terrace overlooking the garden and pool. My buddies from the American Leak Detection were there! That was it, game over, finished, done, no way am I trading my current known pool problems for new unknown pool problems!!!

There's a certain comfort in knowing what your own house problems are. I guess we're back to staying right here!!