Househunting Hell

So what did you guys do this weekend? I spent mine moving from my house on Andrews Air Force Base to a house in Woodbridge, VA. I spent weeks searching out the perfect rental home...and then I gave up on perfect and settled on "livable." I found a pretty liveable place, but the road there was bumpy...and funny. And at times really, really gross.

I started my search online...rent.com, trulia.com, thisplaceisadump.com...and really didn't find much. The few places that looked promising were quickly rented out before I could even get a call in to the landlord. I went on a several walk-throughs, but most ended in disappointment and a strong smell of old lady and cat. One, however, ended with meeting the greatest person on the planet, Morgan. She is the best freakin' realtor out there, and not only because she put up with my crazy schedule, bank issues (see last post), and taking me to see a gazillion homes.



We saw a house full of dead flies. We saw a house with a nightclub-esque basement, complete with mirrored shelves and strange lights and trendy exposed plywood. We saw toilets sitting in the middle of living rooms, questionable paint colors, mirrored walls, teal wall-to-wall carpet, a window cling sticker of the Pope (who surprised us when we opened the blinds to check out a backyard) , mint green bathroom tile, and--my personal favorite--a life-sized mural of The Last Supper painted directly onto a dining room wall.



Some houses were still occupied. We saw scarily-dirty ones that we didn't even look through...though some we checked out just to see how bad they were. One house looked nicely set up until we tried to open the closets...only to find they were jammed so full of junk that the doors couldn't slide open. At more than one house we saw the outside and we split. House-hunting can be downright scary!



For example, we had the crap scared out of us at a townhouse in Woodbridge. Morgan got the key from the lockbox and was unlocking the door when it suddenly opened from the inside, Morgan's hand still outstretched as the knob was taken right out of it. We both jumped about a mile and needed a few deep breaths before we noticed a very nice man stood in the doorway smiling at us. Apparently this place was still occupied...the listing lied! Luckily the tenant had had this happen before and let us in to look around and even answered some questions for us. But Morgan knocked on most doors after that one, just in case...

I did finally settle on a nice little townhouse in Woodbridge. The moving-in is a story for another day that's still just Tuesday (or maybe a Thursday, if my internet gets hooked up!).