"House, n. A hollow edifice erected for the habitation of man, rat, mouse, beetle, cockroach, fly, mosquito, flea, bacillus, and microbe."

~Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

we have been house shopping.  in fact, our house is already sold.  in fact, we close on november 25.

that's three weeks away, people.

we have no where to go.

we have looked at every single house for sale in the school district, which is NOT a small area. 

we don't ask for much.

we need four bedrooms.  that's the biggest problem.  apparently those 2.5 children that the average american family have must share a bedroom.  we're not down with that.  we need a room for us, a room for Princess, a room for Kitten, and a guest bedroom/office/room-for-the-next-(and-last)-baby.

the four bedrooms that we have seen had tiny living areas.  i guess they don't just tack that extra bedroom onto the back.  no, they take a chunk out of the living room instead.

which is not to say that there have not been diamonds in the rough.  there have been.

we found a great four bedroom with wood floors and a big playroom upstairs.  but they wouldn't do a contingency contract with us, and we couldn't afford to be put in a position where we might be responsible for paying two mortgage payments, so we had to wait.  

when we got the offer on our house we turned right around and made an offer.  nope.  sold.  buh-bye.

we were pretty sick about it, but after some time getting over it, we started looking again after a week or so.  you can't start looking right away, because losing a house is like breaking up with someone.  you had envisioned your whole life with this house, and suddenly it's taken away from you.  it's emotional.

so then we found a nice 1970s house in jenks.  for some reason, i really like the 1970s era houses.  much better than the shiny cookie cutter houses in the new additions.  sure, they may not be pristine, they need some paint, and they have really bad orange tile, but they also have details that new houses just don't have, like built-in bookshelves and wet bars (bow-chicka-bow-ow).

so we made an offer, but they wouldn't come down on their asking price.  we made a better offer.  still wouldn't budge.  finally they came down $2k off their asking price.  i'm sorry, but $2k? in this market?? are you insane???  forget that.  turns out they've only been in the house three years and have two mortgages on it, so that's what they need to break even.  well, gee, that's not really *our* problem.

so we moved on.

we looked high and low.  we looked at three bedrooms on large lots that we could build onto.  we looked at four bedrooms on lots so small you could touch the neighbor's house from the back porch.  we looked in new additions.  we looked in old additions.  we spent days doing nothing but driving around.

and then we found The One.  it was awesome.  it was a foreclosure.  perfect neighborhood, fixer-upper, tons of potential, gigantic, cheap as dirt because the bank wanted to unload it.  we saw it.  we made an offer 45 minutes later.  it was saturday.  we were prepared to pay full price.  the house was ours.  we talked all weekend about what color we'd paint it, what walls we'd knock out.

on monday we get a response from the bank.  the house had sold on friday, the day before we'd seen it.

we were sick.  we are sick.  when J told me, i felt like i'd been kicked in the stomach.  i was speechless.

so today we were back out pounding the pavement.  one was too small and had awful pergo floors and smelled a church basement. one had great potential, but it backed right up to 101st street and if the dog got out of the back yard, splat.  one had much of the square footage wasted in an awkward dining room.  one was absolutely gorgeous but it had obvious, fatal structural problems.  one three-bedroom was almost there but it was in the way-too-trafficky 91st and memorial area.  one was dirt cheap and smelled like raw sewage.  one was perfect but it was in a terrible neighborhood full of apartment complexes.  and so on and so forth.

and that was just today.

i swear we're not that picky, but each house we see has some major deal-breaker.  

it's karmically unsound, but i want something awful to happen to those people who stole that house out from under us.  i hope the foundation cracks, i hope there is toxic mold, i hope there is water in the ductwork.  if we can't have it, no one can.

i spent almost two hours yesterday driving every street between 71st and 91st and between riverside and sheridan.  i have canvassed every neighborhood looking for "For Sale" signs, which is no easy feat with all the campaign signs.  (oooh, lookit that one!  aww, man, nevermind, it's another 'barack osama is a marxist' sign.)

i am getting no work done at all.

oh, and to further complicate matters, J had to qualify for financing on his own because after all my hard work, solid career, and impeccable credit score, the bank will flat-out not consider me in our financing because i am self-employed.  which in bankspeak is unemployed.  and our approval expires december 15.

so if we don't have a house by november 25, we're moving in with my sister and her husband.

and if we don't have a house by december 15, we'll be living with them for a very long time.

we could just stay in this house, but it's tiny and we're right on top of each other and we have a willing buyer which i hear is rare in this market but if that's true then why are all the houses that we like getting snatched up?  and why isn't there anything good on the market?  i guess people are so afraid of the market that they're not putting their houses up for sale, so there is just NOTHING out there to choose from.

hello, people!  there are willing buyers out here! *waving frantically*

so here we are, getting ready to go back to the non-negotiating-folks to pay their only-$2k-reduced-price on a house that i am now completely lukewarm about.  sure, there was a time that i was excited about this house, but not anymore.  the Perfect House has come and gone, and i have an extreme case of Housing Market Fatigue, and i don't want to see one. more. house.

dejectedly and with great ambivalence,

-real estate-less in america.