Sometimes I think I just like banging my head against the wall. A house came on the market on Friday and it's just about perfect if you could just pick up the house and plop it down where you wanted it to be. And the price! $219,000 for 1747 square feet, with an unfinished basement. The outside was cute, not the greatest color, what I like to refer to as one of the least offensive shades of bland, but nice windows and doors, and the inside looked great from the photos. Hardwood floors in the living room, dining room, and master bedroom. Main floor master bedroom with ensuite. Gorgeous, big kitchen, large enough to put the table in and use the dining room for the piano and exercise machines. Open floor plan. The second floor has 2 bedrooms, plus a big rec room and there is a second bathroom, a must.

It has a fenced yard with five raised beds for gardening, is a completely flat yard, and has mature fruit trees. But it wasn't too big a yard either, so easy to mow. We drove by it. The only thing it didn't have that was bad was a driveway and there is no street parking, but there is a place for one car under the trees. I don't like the idea of parking under trees as there is so much sap and bird droppings that get on the car that way. There is no garage or storage either, which isn't necessary with the basement. But it looks good otherwise. It really does.

It is even in the right school district for both kids, though right on the borderline for the middle school. And the location is the reason why it's got a lower asking price than the norm. It's close to the freeway. Close enough you can hear it, but not as close as our old house was to the highway. It sounds more like a river than traffic. The neighborhood is okay, but not a favored area for me. I'd say it's lower middle class and I'm not sure what direction it is going, up or down. I looked for signs but they were mixed.

There were some very nice homes there, and a lot of minivans that were at least from this century, but probably early to mid last decade (probably all paid off!). There were also a couple of condmened houses being torn down and a house that had obvious burn damage that was being worked on. There were no wrecked cars and cars up on blocks, there was no sign of trash and the yards were all maintained. The front porches were not all cluttered up with junk. Some of the roofs had a lot of moss, but many where spotless. It was raining hard and a couple of the yards were flooded, which might indicate trouble with basements getting water.

We will probably not make an appointment to look at it. I know I need to have patience, and not push to look at things yet. And as nice as it is, there is enough for me to go, no, it's not got quite enough of my ticky boxes checked. And I don't want to rush into something. We rushed into something in 1998 and I have been regretting it since then. I don't want to make the same mistake we did before, being in a hurry to get out of where we are and not going into things with our eyes wide open.

I want one of my preferred neighborhoods. I want walking distance to certain things. I want to be closer to mom than that (but not so close she walks to me!) And I really do want a driveway. *sighs* I need to stop looking but those shiny real estate sites are just so...shiny.

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Ex-BIL is being a jerk again, no surprise. He has decided to sue SIL to try make her sell the house they still jointly own because she is messing up his credit by not making the payments on time. Of course, he is late every single month in giving her his share of the mortgage, not to mention child support, so of course she cannot make them on time. Kind of a duh thing.

This is the house that two of his children, whom she has full custody of, live in. It takes a special kind of selfishness to be such an awful human being. This is so the cheating, child-molesting idiot and the woman he is currently shacked up with can try to buy a house together. The only reason he is doing it now and not sooner, like when they divorced, was because one of the conditions they had when they built the house through an assistance program, was they had to wait at least five years to sell it or pay a major penalty. Guess when the five years was up?