Roller coaster

Househunting is such a roller coaster.  The Greenlake house is dead to us:  the inspection revealed that it essentially has no foundation at all, just a few stacked blocks every eight feet, which can move and have clearly done so.  Also a fresh dead rat in the attic, no insulation anywhere, and truly lousy parking.  We've moved on.

In the past two days we've had two other houses seriously catch our eye.  One of them we call the Piano House because an upright piano is included in the deal.  The nice elderly lady who lives in it caught me snooping around the property and was kind enough to invite me in.  I thought it was pretty great, partly because it seemed so solid after the Greenlake business, partly because it is cheap, and partly because of the location, walking distance from the boys' preschool and also elementary and middle schools we like a lot.  But Dale (who came later) was not impressed.  The main living space is pretty darned small, not much bigger than the Haddon house, and on a small arterial; we could squeeze into it, but in the long run it would need a second story to accommodate our family, and did we really want to get into building that?  Yech.

Driving around the neighborhood, depressed about not finding the right house, we found another house, and once again the elderly lady who lives in it let me in.  (I seem to have a way with the house ladies.)  This house is a lot like the Piano House, but with a second story!  Four bedrooms plus a rec room, how about that!  Also, it's on a quiet street, the garage is attached, and the deck overlooks the big flat backyard instead of an arterial.  It's really quite good.  The biggest tradeoff (that we know of) is the kitchen, which is small and isolated and doesn't have much promise for expansion.  The other big thing is that the whole house is super ugly.  Ug, Ly.  Terrible old wallpaper, awful fixtures, that kind of thing.  But you know what?  Paint is cheap.  So we're calling it the Ugly House, and we're still pretty interested.

All of this has helped us realize that we do have quite an affection for the Ravenna/Wedgwood zone.  This affection is increased by the total absence of options in Wallingford.  But even aside from that, there's a great alternative elementary school over on this side, the housing is very family-oriented, and there's good access to the U.  We just hope we can live a little farther up the hill than we used to.

And it's truly exhausting, picturing our family in these places, sifting through these fairly high-stakes emotional and financial decisions, changing our minds.  I have barely cooked anything in days because I have been spending all the time either looking at houses or obsessing about them.