So obviously we thought we’d found the house. We canceled our holiday trip to Phoenix so we could stay here and get ready to list our house so that we could make a contingent offer on the new house.

And we worked really, really hard last week. During our 11 days off of work we packed off season items, decluttered, moved out some furniture, cleaned up the front yard, bought a gun safe, replaced light fixtures and put up trim. Today Mike re-graveled the driveway. It was a lot of work and our house looks better now than it ever has in all the time we’ve lived here. Our house is now ready to go on the market with about 48 hours notice - all that’s left to do is to touch up paint and clean really really well.

But now we’re back to playing Goldilocks. The house we loved turns out to not only have a creek with a 150 foot setback requirement which we would have been willing to live with since we still would have had 2.5 usable acres. But when I finally got to the county after they reopened post-holiday we discovered that there’s also a swampy area behind the shop that would have required an additional 40 - 110 foot setback. That additional buffer area would have left us with no way to clear land for pasture, a barn or gardens. Not an acceptable option for us.

So while our house is ready to sell, we can’t list it until we figure out where we’re going. Our agent is pretty sure that our house will sell quickly even in this slow market and we have too many animals and belongings to look for temporary lodgings. We’re back to looking at houses online all week, trying them on in our minds and imagining how they might fit. Then on the weekend visiting them in reality and discovering that they’re not as perfect for us as we hoped. Each one too expensive, too swampy, too imperfectly remodeled, too much in need of repair, too wooded, too something.

There’s a house fairly close in that we like a lot. But it’s only an acre and needs a pretty hefty amount of work for the price so we’re sitting on the idea of it while we continue to look. There’s another to the east of us that’s a nice house but not the right kind of land. There’s a two acre property with stable and pasture close in, but the house is only 920 square feet and set too close to the road. And. And. And.

There’s currently a house that we love the idea of, but we can’t get up to look at it until Saturday morning. On paper it seems to be the perfect land, with barn, shop and cute 1940’s farm house requiring just the right amount of remodeling.

So cross your fingers for us that this fixer upper with barn, garden and pasture is the “just right” house we hope it is. Because there’s nothing worse than being all decluttered and prettied up but with nowhere to go.

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