House Search

I’m starting to freak out. With only a few weeks before we want to move, we’re not having much luck finding places to rent.

Part of me wants to simply give up the house search and look at apartments and townhomes while most of me dreads the idea of shared living facilities. At the same time what we can realistically afford and what we want are on vastly different planes. Mostly. There are houses out there in shady neighborhoods surrounded by car hoarders and people who feel that pajama pants are perfectly acceptable street-wear we could get for our limit, but even with a guard dog, I wouldn’t want the kids to be in those areas. Alas, it was time to stop looking on the internet and start driving around.

After church yesterday my husband and I decided to pick neighborhoods we’d like to look at based off of either the area or where we’d found other homes for rent in our price range recently. This is far more daunting than I previously imagined it would be. Unfortunately there are about fifty houses for sale for every one that is for rent. I counted one place for rent in the areas we looked in, and it was a frightening looking duplex we didn’t even stop the car to check the price or get a phone number for.

Perhaps we’re going about this the wrong way. I think what we’ve been doing is looking for a place to live long term when we really should start looking for a place to rent that we can afford now. As much as I hate to move, I’d rather be able to pay the rent instead of worrying about which bills or food to live without in order to do so. Yes, I despise apartment living, but the townhome we lived in our first year together wasn’t too bad except for the bastards who lived next door to us who played, no blasted, Grateful Dead songs all day and all night and weren’t deterred by multiple visits from the cops for noise ordinance violations. There are a few townhomes in our price range with three bedrooms, a garage and small backyard I really think we need to consider or at least arrange a tour. It may not be ideal, but again if we can at least live there for a year or two until we can afford something better it might be worth it. Or perhaps we may find it not so bad after all and stay until we have saved up enough and repaired our credit to the point we could start house hunting again. Of course the pessimist in me (which always trumps the optimist) says there is a fat chance in hell of that being the case. We’ll see.