Reporting To You Live, From The Depths Of House-Hunting Despair

It was decided unanimously between Hubby and myself that there is just no way on earth we're going to manage to squeeze another year of living out of the trailer we're currently living in.  Six years ago it was given to us, free.  There were holes in the floor, a pile of junk 6-inches deep covering every surface, and a terrible smell permeated everything.  We gutted the entire thing, hung new drywall, laid new floors, and completely redid the plumbing and wiring.  But we're not experts.  And a new inside is really no match for a damaged outside.  The older this place gets, the more the exterior flaws are affecting the interior.  I won't drag out the laundry list of issues.  I'll just leave it at: There's just no way we can squeeze another year out of it.

Our original plan was to buy a newer trailer, outright, no mortgage, just money from savings plus maybe a small personal loan from the bank.  (Certainly not a mortgage.  I steadfastly refuse to take out a mortgage on anything with wheels underneath.)  We would get rid of this trailer, move the new(er) trailer here, pay it off as quickly as we could and then go back to saving up money to build a house.  But then we happened to come across a deal on a house that seemed too good to pass up.  It was a fixer-upper, but the repairs needed were the type that could easily be managed by amateurs.  Unfortunately, it turns out there are just too many hoops to jump through in order to get a mortgage on a fixer-upper like that, but before giving up on it, we had already gone through the process of finding out we actually were approved for a mortgage, so we decided to go ahead and continue on in the house-hunt.

We've found several houses in our price range that we liked.  And every single time we've reached the point where we wanted to get the ball rolling on a purchase, the house would get put under contract by someone else.  Most recently, last night.  The realtor called Hubby and told him we had an appointment at 1:00 today to see the house we just fell head over heels in love with.  I mean, it is house perfection.  Everything we were looking for!  And not 5 minutes later, the realtor called back to let us know it had just gone under contract. I cried.  That's not an exaggeration.  I mean, I wasn't sobbing or anything, but I absolutely shed a few tears.  (And if you know me, you know I am so not a crier.)

So, it's back to the house-hunt grind.  Again.  We're going to look at a different house later today.  A nice one, sure, but in a neighborhood we're not crazy about.  And I've just found another that, house-wise would probably place a close second to the house-perfection we missed out on last night, but again, not an awesome neighborhood.  (House-perfection was on 5.5 acres just outside the city limits.  Living out here for the past six years, I've come to enjoy not having neighbors right on top of us.) 

This is feeling more and more like deliberately chasing a migraine.