This is painful...

...I mean, REALLY painful. Day 1-1/2 of house-hunting proved no more fruitful than the first 1/2 day. We've already paraded through about a dozen houses and I have yet to experience that 'AAAAAAHHHHHHHHH' moment. You know what I'm talking about...think Chevy Chase and Beverly D'Angelo standing in the middle of nowhere with their freezing kids in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation. All of a sudden through the trees though they, or at least HE, sees the perfect 50-foot Christmas tree already glowing in lights and you hear the music in the background - 'AAAAAHHHHHHHHH'. That's what I'm waiting for but all I'm hearing is the little voice in my head telling me to run, Run, RUN as fast as you can out of there! No, it hasn't been that bad and to be perfectly honest, if we could take one house we saw and put it on another property we saw, our search would be over. We either find the perfect house with no yard to speak of or the perfect yard with the house that screams 1970s! We've also found a couple that would be great...with very attractive prices...but they would require a lot of work to be done before we could even move in. It's been almost sad at times walking in some of these homes that are bank-owned where the previous owner lost it through foreclosure. It's actually pretty pathetic when you see every appliance has been removed, light fixtures and ceiling fans torn down, baseboards and crown molding ripped out. Our realtor told us she went in a house once that had been foreclosed and the previous owner had even torn out the toilets!

So for us, at the end of today, we've looked at the homes that meet our criteria that are within a 30-minute commute for Randy...but without any luck. I haven't seen a single one that I would like to go back and look at again. So tomorrow we expand our search to include the 30-45 minute commute area and hopefully we'll have better success.