Adventures In House Hunting

Well, as most of you know we have been down here now for almost 3 months, and during that time we have been on a quest to find the "perfect home". To some that may seem like it would be an easy task. With the economy in trouble and the failing housing market, you would think that there would be an abundance of homes for us to choose from, well.......... Let me share with you our criteria! 1. Big - The house has to be big enough to accomodate a man who has more tools than Home Depot, 4 kids with more toys combined than ToysRus, a dog, and a woman who wants a house big enough that I can hide and not be found for at least 10 minutes. 2. Nice - The fixing up thing just does not do anything for me right now. 3. Has to have property attached - For the farm boy I am married too! 4. Within 10 minutes from Jasen's work - So he can come home for lunch, and help keep my sanity intact.

So I would say our realtor has had a pretty tall order, but she has done an amazing job. We found one place that we loved, offered, and it fell through. We found another place, we didn't love so much, offered on it anyway, and it fell through. We were starting to feel a little discouraged, when we came upon what seemed to be our "dream house". Online it looked like a picture, so we decided to drive by and check it out. Well, as we drove up our excitement grew as we saw one of the most beautiful pieces of property, big brick house, pasture, huge pond/lake, woods...perfect. I quickly made a call to our realtor who arranged for us to see it the following day. First impressions were "this is it!" We loved it. Yes, it is a little older, and outdated inside, but worth investing in because the property is so pretty. To cut a long story short, we made an offer contingent upon Jasen's "fine tooth comb" inspection of the property. So, today we went over to do our inspection. It was a typical Ketchikan day, blowing, raining, cold....made me homesick!
Our realtor greeted us and as we began to chat, Jasen took off to check things out, the attic being his first stop. After about 15 minutes, Jasen came back smiling (which normally is a good sign) however, he had found some scary wiring and some wet sheetrock from a leaky roof. "Well," I said "how bad is it?" "The whole roof needs to be reshingled" Jasen replied, "but that's not all I found" "Really?" I said "what else?" "Uuuh... half a dozen shed snake skins...." Those that know me can imagine my response, so I won't go into detail. The skins were about 3 to 4 feet long...SO GROSS!!!!! Jaden thought they were very cool, obviously, but they were taller than he was. Upon further inspection Jasen found more in the crawl space. Thankfully the snakes here are in hibernation so we didn't see any live action. So now our dream house is back on the market and waiting for it's new owner, which is not going to be us...at least they won't have rodent problems, and they'll never be lonely either!!!

A "Chicken Snake" harmless but disgusting!

So all that to say, we have looked everywhere for the right place, and still haven't quite found it. We are continuing to trust that God will provide. He knows the house that is for us, and I'm sureit will come up in His time. All the looking sure has created some fun memories though!