House Hunting

For the second weekend in a row, The Wife and I spent half our day with a realtor checking out houses. Some houses were good, some houses were bad. The charmer pictured on the right, for instance, did not make the cut. However, the half-completed exterior paint was not the reason; the interior continued the theme you see here. The listing price was much higher than we wanted to pay to buy all that work. A shame, really; the neighborhood looked pretty nice.

I find myself suddenly fascinated with crawlspaces. I also find myself struggling to pay attention to things. I've taken over 300 pictures to help me remember what we've seen and what we liked and what we didn't.

Last week, we found an interesting house in southeastern Maryville that had tremendous potential; we would need to sink a fair amount of work into it to be a good option. We also found a house under construction in Island Home that looked pretty good (although a little smaller than what we've become accustomed to here at The Estate At Louisville). Today we found three interesting choices -- two on the same street in North Knox, both fairly recent and nice, with privacy fences. We're more interested in the 3+2 than the 2+2; we don't particularly need a third bedroom but having it makes the house much easier to re-sell. The fifth interesting prospect we found was in Fountain City, which had been built as a duplex but since reunified. The current owner (who bought it for development purposes) finished the attic and broke it down into two big rooms with four gabled rooms, each a little different from the other, and set up the kitchen in an interesting way.

The process is a little more fun than I thought it would be, although I still think The Wife is having a better time of it than I. She gets so happy and excited looking at all these houses! I'm enjoying it more from the aspect of seeing how we could make a not-so-nice house into a really good place to live. It means I have to look past whatever furnishings, paint, wallpaper, or other decorative choices are there and see only the structure of the house -- and sometimes I have to try and consider changing the structure, too. I think I've gotten pretty good at seeing potential rather than tawdry reality; of course, that also means I'm buying myself a lot of work and/or expense to make those visions a reality.