Today’s fun thing? We found an awesome house—the first one we looked at [again!]. Great, we thought, it JUST came on the market, we’ll get our app in and be done. Except no, they’re not looking at apps until MONDAY. So of course by then they’ll have a mountain of them to sift through and to get ours to stand out we’d need to offer more rent. It was already over our budget so adding more just wasn’t realistic. [Sidenote: That really pisses me off. You put it on the market so take my app and be done—or raise the listed rent price to start. None of this other BS.]
So we kept looking. Everything we saw was simply okay—nothing that we loved. There was either no basement or what they called a basement wasn’t really (one was literally a 6×10 room with a fireplace right inside the front door?!); fenced patios with no grass or doors to the patio/grassy area were on the lowest level (doable but not convenient at all for letting Maggie out); only three bedrooms with no good place for guests or an office; and lots of townhouses with absolute crap for parking.
There were a few we surely could have made work, but we still had more on our list so we kept going.
Then we saw one that was almost identical to the very first one we wanted—it was the same floor plan but with less hardwood/more carpet and no bedroom in the basement. But we still really liked it so it became our top choice. It had been on the market awhile so we were pretty confident we didn’t have to act immediately so we kept looking. But we referred to it as the Band-Aid house because there were little cosmetic issues throughout (stains on carpet, no fence, no ceiling fans, etc.) but nothing serious. 🙂
We took a mid-afternoon break to get lunch and let Katie take a nap while our agent had another appointment.
Afterwards, it was back to work. She drove by a few and said the parking was horrible so we were able to cross them off without even looking at them. A few others didn’t even have any grass patches so those were immediately out. And another one was doable but not great. And others just felt too small. One was in a perfect spot—right across from a walking trail to the pool (maybe 100 yards away) along a grassy, wooded area—but of course the house wasn’t quite right.
We had time to wait at that one so walked around—and Owen actually held a caterpillar! I never thought I’d see the day he’d hold a bug! (Of course, Katie picked one up and immediately tried to squish it!)
But we still had a few on our list we needed to check out before deciding on the Band-Aid house…so we knew we had another house hunting day ahead of us… But at least we had pretty much centered our search on the Lorton area—Alexandria was just too crowded with no parking. I’m sure some of the homes themselves were livable—but it’s very hard to give up space when that’s all you’ve ever known. And of course we had the open-floor-plan Band-Aid house in our memory.