More Driving, More Looking, Still No House

More unsuccessful hunting yesterday. Tom-the-realtor is going away for a long weekend (starting today), which is something he seems to do often. We are becoming somewhat anxious about finding a house, and decided that it would not be too disloyal to pop up to Mount Airy, where he referred us to an unhelpful realtor a couple days ago, and see if we could find a realtor who would show us some houses. Ed did succeed in finding a very nice realtor named Virginia, who dropped what she was doing to help us. She showed us a couple new houses in the subdivision Ed has been pining after. How two people can live happily together and have such dramatically different views on what constitutes an attractive home is beyond me. I was near tears as we drove through that subdivision, which wound on and on in an endless line of nearly identical ugly houses. The houses were, according to the realtor, wood frame construction, but they looked for all the world like mobile homes, plopped on rectangular brick foundations. Ed sees charm in this look, but it escapes me. Ed tried to put me in a more positive frame of mind by pointing out that the home we were going to see was on two acres, but, when we reached the house, we discovered that even this apparent asset was not quite what it sounded. The house was located at the top of a hill, and the yard dropped off immediately after the driveway. The only flat place in the back yard was the deck, and the fall from the deck, which K. tried to experience, had to be more than 20 feet. The slope of the back yard looked to be about 50 degrees, and most of the “two acres” was uncleared. The kids, unused to hills, started running down the hill and wound up tumbling ‘til they stopped in a pile of rocks and thorn bushes. They were dripping blood and none too happy when we toured the house (I mopped them up so they didn’t get blood all over the crumby yellow carpet), which proved to be a big disappointment. Even Ed, fan of recently built houses that he is, had to admit that the quality of construction and materials was pathetic.

Virginia-the-realtor, trouper that she is, took us back to the office to see what else might suit us. She found a 1950’s house that looked ugly but met our criteria by being vacant and large enough. It was another disappointment, although it was in a nice neighborhood. The back yard was pretty, but the house itself was run-down and dreadful, with much of the living space in the basement. We thanked Virginia and went off to drown our dismay in dinner at an all-you-can-eat buffet place (indigestion is a fine distraction).

The most useful thing we managed yesterday was probably to drive from the brick farm house (the one Bo looked so pretty in front of) to Mount Airy to get a feel for how far it was from civilization. The drive was really only 20 minutes, but the roads were very twisty and it felt longer. I’m not sure whether I could get used to driving on corkscrew roads, or, worse, used to the idea of Ed driving with the kids on them. The country was beautiful, though.

For those of you who might e-mail me (Mom), Comcast seems to have finally cut us off and I can’t get at my mail anymore.