Our laid-back house search

It's been a very low-grade sort of search since we're satisfied with where we are now for the most part. Eventually we want to own, but we like our neighborhood and general location quite well, and the townhouse is big enough and nice enough to serve well enough. With all those enoughs, our current place isn't our dream home, but certainly satisfactory for now.

All that to say we haven't quite been pounding on the realtor's door. Instead we've got some automated Internet searches for listings. Since we're not in a hurry, we've been pinging our realtor for the occasional house viewing for a year or so, some of them more out of curiosity than actual interest.

Since we aren't in a time crunch, we've narrowed down our search to an almost silly range of variables. It hasn't been until 2008 that anything really started showing up in what we would consider our price range, and even then they were typically dumps. Prices have continued to fall, so we've slowly seen more places that are in our price range and are less and less dumpy.

The one we most recently saw is bank-owned, has some major mold damage on a wall and a leak that was heavy enough to soak down through from the upper floor down to the lower one and make a LARGE puddle. Even with all that, the bank is still asking for more than we're interested in paying. We would drop their price further, and require that they fix everything first. Other than those problems though, it's a nice place.

If they just laugh at us, then oh well, and we'll continue to wait.

Such is the exciting life we lead.