Window Shopping

The Wife and I are nearing the final stages of being pre-approved for a mortgage, and looking around for an appropriate home of our own. My parents will be moving down permanently within the next fourteen months and taking up permanent residency here at The Estate At Louisville, so it’s good that things are moving in this direction, I suppose. With my career arc in some question right now – I’m still not really happy where I’m at and unsure of how to weigh my options – this may be premature and we may have to abandon the idea of getting a home here at all, but for now it makes sense to me to plan on staying in the area for a while.

Of course, if we do wind up going somewhere else – Nashville or the high desert in California being the other two leading options – the same sorts of things apply. We know we won’t find someplace as grand and luxurious as The Estate At Louisville for what we’re willing to pay, but that’s okay – our needs are actually quite modest. So far we’re looking at the following “must have” criteria for a house:

1. Fenced-in yard for the doggies;
2. At least 1,000 liveable square feet;
3. At least two bedrooms – one for us to sleep in and the other to use as an office;
4. At least one and a half bathrooms – having to wait is unpleasant;
5. Functional HVAC;
6. Good electrical wiring and plentiful outlets;
7. Not located in a high-crime area;
8. High-speed internet available;
9. Some kind of parking for both our vehicles.

Ideally, we’d find something with some of the “would like” features:

10. Screened-in porch or at least some kind of deck;
11. Adequate internal storage for clothes and stuff;
12. Finished basement;
13. Trees;
14. Location near grocery store;
15. A stand-alone structure, not a condominium;
16. Proximity to work (meaning downtown Knoxville);
17. TVA or KUB utilities;
18. Trees;
19. Location on a grade for drainage during heavy storms.

Within our price range, there are several pieces of property available – unfortunately, more than half of them are in a bad part of the town, so they are not desirable and unlikely to move fast when the time comes to sell again. So part of looking involves paging through magazines, and part of it involves searching through MLS listings online, and part of it involves checking the addresses against maps to see where these places are.

It’s a time-consuming and tedious process. I don’t really know whether The Wife enjoys it or not; sometimes she seems to really get into it and sometimes she seems frustrated and unhappy. She absolutely loves the home shows on HGTV and TLC; one of her favorites is the “house hunters” show where a home buyer looks at three or sometimes four houses and eventually picks one.

With The Wife’s computer in the shop, this is all being done on my computer. That’s OK but it feels a little weird to be standing around throwing darts while The Wife is surfing the net where I am usually stationed doing my class work or goofing off or blogging or writing. Just strange, is all.

And since so many places that look good on paper are not in good parts of town, it is easy to get frustrated – and tempting to go above our price range. So far we’ve been pretty well-disciplined about it. But we’ll see how it works out; it’s one thing to agree with the advice of “buy all the house you can afford,” but harder to remember what you really can afford when something else that seems really nice is “just a few thousand dollars” more. And, unsurprisingly, there is a generally inverse relationship between how far our housing dollars sretch and how close to work the house in question is located.

So we’ll probably continue looking and engage the services of a real estate agent soon. I suppose I should say I’m excited about this. And I am, but the shopping process is not inherently enjoyable for me; so it’s not really the same kind of fun excitement that, say, skiing or diving is. I’d rather be doing something else; but it’s something that has to be done and so it’s something that I’ll apply myself to do. I hope The Wife can handle my lack of overall enthusiasm for the total project and not interpret it as lack of care about where we live — she just seems to derive more pleasure from this than I do.