Thursday Bonus Post - On House Hunting

Every time I shop for jeans or shoes (or any clothing items that I plan to wear regularly) I always try to remember that unless I love the item when I first try it on, I'm probably not going to get much wear out of it.  Yet, I keep burning myself over and over on this one for some reason.  I'll hem and haw about a pair of jeans or sweater and then decide to buy it, but then realize (after literally hemming this time) that it doesn't fit properly, or it looks terrible, and then end up donating it to people with diabetes (why do they need so many clothes anyway?  That joke is Brahm's; credit where credit is due).  I'm getting better at remembering this rule but I still forget it on occasion.

It's quite a bit easier to follow this rule with houses though, since it's thousands and thousands of dollars we're talking about.  If you're going to hem and haw about a house right off the bat, you probably should just walk away.  But if you love one you should force yourself to hem and haw about it too.

Brahm and I found a house that we both really liked at first/second look, but then started to think more critically about it and realized that it got absolutely zero direct light, which is a big deal breaker for us.  I refuse to live in a house where you need to turn the lights on at any hour of the day - I think it has potential to become a depression shack in the winter.  It was a good lesson for us to learn, and we're lucky that we found a house like that to learn it from (i.e. a house that has been on the market for a while so we had time to go back and look at it a second and third time), considering that many of the good houses on the market in Saskatoon will sell in a day and you don't have that luxury of going back and spending several days trying to figure things out.

As we learn these lessons by looking at more houses and hemming and hawing over the ones we like, eventually we will get to a place where we can spot what we want and don't want right away and know when it's time to make an offer.  It's been an exhausting week - we've probably looked at around 15-20 houses between the two of us (I've been going during the day while Brahm has been at work so we can speed up our property virgin education) but I think we've learned a lot about what we want and don't want and what we'll see in our price range.  Hopefully soon we will be able to put all of our newfound knowledge to use and buy an awesome house!

To be continued...