I’m really nervous about starting over (AGAIN).  I hate looking for houses, for one.  I always feel like I can’t find anything that is even liveable in our price range.  That’s not true, but it feels like that when we’re looking.  And I have to say that when we looked at examples of real estate in the town where we interviewed last weekend, it wasn’t bad.  In fact, most of the homes were on par or better than the ones we lived in while in New York.  They certainly weren’t as awful as the ones we looked at near the church here.

The problem we had here was that the church is in a rather expensive suburb, with lots of very expensive houses.  We didn’t want to be house poor, so we looked at some really terrible places before finally buying in another town nearby.  For that I am thankful because with everything that has happened in recent months, we’ve not been subjected to thinking about our situation whenever we look out the windows.  Instead, it’s an escape and we are grateful for it.

Ideally, I’d like a house with three bedrooms, two bathrooms, an open floor plan, and some kind of additional space.  Call it a man cave, game room, whatever, I like what we currently have in our basement.  If we do end up moving to the area we visited, there aren’t any basements, meaning that we would need the additional square footage off the bat.  That’s going to be tough to pull off.  I do realize we can live with less, but I’ve truly enjoyed our current house.  I can honestly say that we don’t need the total square footage that we currently have, but it seems like we will be eliminating more than what I’m comfortable with in order to have a house that works for us in our price range.  At the same time, I don’t really know what that price range is right now.  And I don’t know for sure where we’ll be living.  I do hope that we don’t run into difficulties with our year-old furniture that my parents bought for us.  That would be frustrating.

If I knew a year ago that this year would have been like this, I would have opted for a cheaper house, not bought anything new for it, and spend most of the year focused on paying down debts.  But we didn’t know this was a short term situation.  It makes it harder for me to look at the next situation as being long-term.  We’ve lived in our last two houses less than two years each.  That’s a hard thing to swallow, and a hard thing to move beyond.  Will we be in our next house longer?  Hopefully at least five years?  Is it worth it to invest in a home so that we are comfortable there right off the bat, or should we wait to make sure it sticks?

The other day when I was working on our taxes, I came across the section about selling a house.  It asks what you sold it for, then what you bought it for in the beginning, plus the total of permanent home improvements.  I totaled them all up, only to discover that it doesn’t matter what personal loss we experienced (at least not to the IRS).  Irritating, when I saw the numbers of just how much we lost on our last house.  And all to come here and have our hearts broken.

It reminds me of someone I knew in college.  She was dating a guy for three years or so, and was planning for a marriage with him.  She had gotten rid of her computer because he had one, made plans for a life together, etc.  Suddenly he broke up with her and she had not just the emotional burden but a financial one in replacing items that she assumed they would share.  I guess that sometimes in this world, the commitments we think will stick just don’t.