Monday, July 24, 2006

Back in North Carolina

I wouldn’t recommend our house-hunting method to anyone. We drove all the way to Roanoke yesterday, and then this morning the realtor for the brick house we saw Friday called and said he’d like to move our appointment to 3:30. We found a couple real estate booklets that had a few interesting houses in the Roanoke area, but we couldn’t immediately reach the realtors and didn’t have time to shilly-shally, so we drove back to NC without ever having looked at any Roanoke houses. Naturally, we had managed to lose our NC map over the weekend, and so the drive back took a bit longer than it should have and the realtor had to wait for us (and give us directions over the phone as we drove) anyway.

The realtor is a very pleasant old fellow, who did his best to ignore the fact that our children were acting up – six days in the car have not brought out their most charming behavior. He showed us around the house and answered our questions as best he could. On closer inspection we noticed a few things that we hadn’t on our previous visits. There is a leaky pipe under the kitchen in the basement, and the air conditioner isn’t working. The trim that goes between the baseboards and the wood flooring is missing throughout the entire house – apparently it was removed when they refinished the floors. The kitchen is still a total hodge podge of cabinets and counters added in various decades, and has no upper cupboards deep enough for dinner plates. There is also a colony of crickets on the ceiling in a corner of the basement. Still, we like the house. The location is on a busier road than I’d like, but there isn’t actually a huge lot of traffic, it is just moving at a pretty good clip. I think that with a fence across the front of the property (I’m picturing split rail, with roses climbing along it!) we’d be okay. The town that is about fifteen minutes away has a library, a community pool, and even a very small Episcopal church (which only shows one service a week on their sign board, but maybe that would work.) Ed is a little worried about the plumbing, and also about having a well and septic, but I think we will probably make an offer on that house tomorrow, contingent on an inspector not finding any surprises, and see what happens. The sellers may very well just laugh at us and our puny offer out, but who knows?

Our Comfort Inn has an indoor pool with a spa, and the kids and I had it all to ourselves tonight. Fun in the pool and then pizza delivered to the room were what we needed tonight!


Blogger decided to let me upload several pictures tonight. The one of the front shows the one car garage, which also has a good sized storage area. The room with the ugly panelling is the living room. I would Want to take off the panelling and put up drywall, but the lazy way would be to paint it white.

1 comment:

CeCe said...

Hey, that house looks pretty nice and big!