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Last week I blogged about my family's emotional response to moving, now I feel the need to dish about house hunting. Aye yi yi. House hunting is worse than car shopping or swim suit shopping, a lot worse.
Let me bring you up to speed, just in case you don't know my life story....
Two adults, three kids between the age of nine and 14 and possibly an 18 year old moving from Florida to the Chicago area. Did I mention the bird, the cocker spaniel and the cat? They are all moving, too. Did I also mention I'm frugal thrifty cheap? I bet you're beginning to see why house hunting was such a problem, aren't you?
Moving from an area with a relatively low cost of living to one with an extremely high cost of living is a problem. Not wanting to buy a house and not having a down payment TO buy a house is also a problem. And then there's the need for a pet friendly house plus a house big enough to accommodate all (or most) of the people in my family.
I'd rather shop for swim suits for all of us than house hunt under these conditions ever again.
Our first stop, in November, when we were still telling ourselves the move was "just a possibility" was our trusty friend Craigslist. Go ahead and click that link - take a look at the cost of houses in the area. Compare those prices with the prices of houses in the area we currently live in. Besides the cost of rentals, did you notice that there are very few four bedrooms with finished basements and almost no five bedroom houses lurking there?
You see the problem, right?
We spent a few months watching the Craigslist fly by, marking a few that looked interesting and getting our "bearings" on which communities would be worth watching more closely. When the move became official, we got down to business and watched closely for any listings that were 20 minutes from Evanston, IL. We started searching property management listings and real estate listings for rentals. We found a house we really liked and contacted the real estate agent. She set up a page for us and dropped a few more listings in it for us to consider - most of those were $2K and even $3K over our established price limit!
We made flight and hotel reservations and were headed to Evanston at the end of April to find a place to live - OR ELSE! But, a week before the trip, there were still only two possible houses on the page created by the real estate agent... I was not happy so I got busy and found 12 more that suited our needs.
The day we arrived in Chicago, we went on a drive by parade of homes. This means we picked up a rental car at Midway and drove by a house in Lincolnwood. From there we drove past two houses in Glenview. Then we moved onto three houses in Wilmette. We tried to drive by four houses in Evanston but we couldn't find two of them and were so happy to finally see a McDonald's after driving around for two hours that we never went back to try to find the two we missed. We swung past three more houses in Skokie and then we landed in our hotel and talked over what we'd seen in our drive by parade of homes.
By the time we met our real estate agent to look at all of those houses "for real", we had an idea of which houses were actual possibilities and which just would not do (Lincolnwood was too far away and one in Wilmette didn't look so hot, one in Skokie had a band of feral beasts roaming the streets glaring at passing cars... stuff like that.) Little did we know from quick glances from the car as we passed...
We saw some great houses the next day. We saw some really horrible houses, too. We saw houses that would have been perfect if they'd had just one more bathroom, one more bedroom, or were just a little less money. We saw a house with a secret room, hidden behind a bookshelf (which is a blog post all its own and you should ask TW to blog that, since
