So we went hunting this weekend (we haven’t actually seen the inside of anywhere yet, just drove to check out the neighborhood and exteriors of the houses we’d seen ads for on the internet and to scribble down numbers to call from yard signs as we cris-crossed throughout neighborhoods that we wouldn’t mind living in that we suspected might still be in our price range. Learned a few things, half the city is for sale, but very little of it is for rent. What’s more, neighborhood-wise, our city is a strange little place. What’s more, our city is being “revitalized” meaning the lines between good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods is getting a bit blurry. Many of the homes we looked at were in neighborhoods where nicely maintained and remodeled houses sat directly alongside of houses that looked ready to collapse. One was on a street that literally was split down the middle. Look to your left and you’re staring at middle-class America, look to your right and it’s the slums (I honestly don’t recall which side of the street the rental property was on, because the sketchy side of the street was sketchy enough to make us keep driving). Another thing I couldn’t believe is how few homes allowed pets. Now we’re not giving up our cats for a house (one we’ll only be in 2 years max, at that), but having them literally knocked out a good 75% of the homes we looked at. Even the rattier looking houses (some of which were so bad we wouldn’t have even considered them if we could have) said “no pets allowed.” A word of advice to those owners, if your house is about to fall down anyways, having a cat running around it isn’t going to hurt anything.

We still need to contact our main choices and get a tour of the inside of the houses, and there’s a few places we saw ads for in the Sunday paper that we’ve yet to check out, but so far we have two main options we’re considering. The first is the little yellow house in the picture on the right. This one is at the top, but inside, of our original price range (which, once we started looking, we expanded a bit). It’s neighborhood, while certainly not the wealthiest, is clean and decent looking, and the houses, while old, look well-maintained and in good shape. It has a mix of hardwood floors and carpet, and (as best we could see from the window) the kitchen floor is tile, though it could just be a realistic looking linoleum (we were just peering in from a window after all). Two major cons include that we’d have only on street parking, and the stairs you see in that picture are only half of them. The house is built on the side of a steep hill. There’s a path of steep stairs to get up to it, the ground the house is on is level, then in the backyard, there are more stairs as the hill continues to climb. That’d be hell on move-in and move-out day and in fact I suspect we might have to hire professional movers as I’m not sure the two of us could even get our largest TV up and down those stairs by ourselves (considering it took 3 people to get it into our townhouse on flat ground). Also, the stairs would pretty much be prohibitively steep for any visits from TheBoyfriend™’s grandmother. On the other hand, after a year or two of living there, I bet we’d have the cutest asses in town ;-).

The other option is a brick house not too far from the yellow house. This one we like a little better from the outside, but we don’t know much about as there’s no web listing so we’ll need to call the number. We don’t know the price, but there are a couple of other slightly larger houses we looked at in the same neighborhood (one on the same street), that were just barely over what we are looking to pay. We’re hoping that this one, being a bit smaller will also be a bit cheaper and therefore just inside our price range. We also have no idea what the pet policy will be (which is probably more worrisome than the price at this point). Still, I think it’s the favorite at the moment. While it obviously doesn’t meet my modern aesthetic tastes (like the house we’re building will), it still seems to fit us better that the yellow house in my gut. It’s just one of those things where I can kind of see us living in a house like this one (for a couple years that is) more so than in the vinyl-sided bit of americana that is the yellow house. Still we don’t even know if this one is a viable option yet.

And finally there’s a few more just outside the city we need to call on to find out about. Renting just outside the city will give us more bang for the buck, and considering where my office is, depending on where some of them are, it may not add to my commute at all (TheBoyfriend™ has to drive all over the area for his job anyways so it won’t effect him that way at all). Of course if we can’t find anything for what we want to spend, we’ll just stay where we are for now. It’s not like we hate it there or anything, just thought that if we were going to have to pay more anyways, we might upgrade a bit.