Be vewy, vewy quiet! I'm hunting...

 

Betcha thought I was gonna say "wabbits", eh?  😊

For one thing -- ew.  My issue with hunting wabbits is dealing with the dead animal afterward.  I don't like dealing with dead animals.  It took me years to be able to handle raw chicken from the grocery store, and it still makes me queasy (sometime I'll tell you about our adventures in raising and butchering our own chickens...).  It's not that I couldn't shoot it -- I'm a crack shot and although I do consider myself an animal lover, I don't find wabbits (or rabbits) particulary endearing. I don't hate them and want them all to die, but out here, they're just kind of...idk...there.  I don't think they're that cute.  If I had a garden, they'd be in it, trying to destroy it, which would annoy me.  My cats like to catch and eat rabbits, and will leave parts of them around for me every now and then (thanks, guys).  We used to have a dog that loved finding rabbit nests, and then playing with the baby bunnies.  And by "playing" I don't mean the cute little Disneyesque image of happy little animals frolicking together in furry woodland creature harmony, I mean Magnum would stick his snout into those nests and flush out the baby bunnies, and then pick them up in the air and toss them around like toys.  Did you know baby bunnies can scream?  I didn't, until Magnum found his first nest of baby bunnies.   Man oh man.

But that's not where I wanted to go with this post.  I've been hunting, alright.  Not wabbits, and not hunting high and low (ha! or should I say, a-ha!).  We have been somewhat half-heartedly house hunting.

How difficult is it to hunt a house? They can't hide very well, they're easy to sneak up on, and they're easy to hit.  Haven't you ever heard the saying about not being able to hit the broad side of a barn? I guess that's a little different, but the concept is similar. 

It's odd, though, because for the first time in our lives, we're in the very odd position of looking at houses when we don't need to move.  Truth be told, I have wanted to write about this for a while, to figure some of these thoughts out, but just haven't felt up to it yet.  (Because the main reason I write is not for your entertainment, believe it or not, but for my own sanity! In which case, I've got a LOT of catching up to do, ba-ha-ha-haaaa).  I suppose one could argue that we technically have never "needed" to move, but one would just be stalling for time by doing so at this point.  Like one is now, by rambling on and picking nits and using all sorts of extraneous filler words and such like that.

The thing is, we do like where we live now. We like the area, we're pretty content with the location of our little plot of land, the way it's set up, our commute times to places like work and church and places of convenience and entertainment, and of course family and friends, and the overall feeling of relative privacy and seclusion we have (except that we live on a 2-lane highway).  The house needs updating, which we knew when we bought it 17 years ago. We had always planned on either fixing up/adding on to the existing house, or building a new house here.  We just keep putting it off and putting it off for various reasons I don't need to list here.  

Well, I don't know if you've noticed, but in the last year or so, the cost of building materials has skyrocketed.  It's insane.  We basically came to the conclusion that it would cost about the same amount of money to buy a new place as it would to build a new house.  So we half-heartedly started looking to see what was out there -- you know, for shits and giggles.  Of course, it's a seller's market right now, which is not the greatest time to be looking to buy a house, but on the flip side, it's a great time to be trying to sell a house.  The ol' conundrum of, if we could get xyz for our house, we'd have xyz more to put toward an even better house!  

I've always enjoyed house hunting.  Which is strange, because I'm not a fan of shopping in general.  Maybe it's because I lived in the same house for 19 years when I was growing up and always craved moving to a different place.  Maybe it's the whole idea of "packing up and starting over" at a certain point.  Whatever the appeal, I don't mind keeping on top of sales ads, hoping to find that perfect deal.  

Which...we have not found yet.  It's been a very interesting search, though.  Every other time we've been looking to buy a house, we've looked for fixer-uppers.  It's hard for me to get out of that mindset, because this time, that's not what we want.  This time, we want a place that's already fixed up.  We want to save ourselves all that time and work, if possible.  I'm not considering things like painting the walls as "fixing up" because that's decorating; I mean things like building the fricking walls.  (And yes, we have looked at places that needed walls built. In the bathroom.  You could've at least shown that picture in the ad...)  

I'm getting a lot better at deciphering real estate ads.  Allow me to share some things I've learned recently, that anyone who is looking for a home OR marketing one for sale might want to keep in mind:

• You have to look for what is NOT pictured.  If the ad says it's a 4 bedroom, 3 bathroom house, make sure all of those are accounted for in the photos.  
• And if there are no photos of the inside of the house whatsoever, be wary.  
• If the description in the ad talks more about how nice the land and the outbuildings are, be wary.  
• It probably goes without saying that staged pictures make a place look much, much better than un-staged pictures do.  (Yes, we all know that homes are lived-in, but we don't really want to see your pile of mail and miscellaneous papers on the table when looking at pictures of places we're considering spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on!)  
• Oh, another thing, the photos should focus more on the house's features and less on the cute decorations inside.  I don't care if you got wine from Vino in the Valley and set it up on a cute little bistro table on the back deck with a pair of wine glasses on a cute white tablecloth, I want to see how big that back deck really is in that photo!  
• Have at least one other person look at the photos. They will catch things you miss.  (Like carpeted walls...true story. I sent an ad to my hubby just this morning, of a place I've looked at online at least six times, and his reaction was "is that a carpeted wall?".  I totally missed it. Six times.)
• There is no such thing as smell-o-vision, but if you think you can smell a photo, you probably can.

That's all I've got for now.  All that being said, I do want to reiterate what I said above about the fact that we do like where we live and would love to stay in this area.  And as we keep reminding each other, when one or the other of us gets our hopes up about the potential of a certain property and then we go tour it and it turns out to not have lived up to our expectations, "There's absolutely nothing wrong with staying right here!"  Moving is a pain in the ass, especially when you have not just a house worth of stuff to move, but also two horses and no horse trailer, several cars (most of which are running and driveable), and two barns worth of stuff, too.  Moving would be as much work as building a damn new house.  But I want central air. LOLOLOL

Later, gators.