Category: House & Home

I forgot to mention that we attended an open house over the weekend just to get our feet wet with looking at home interiors. The house was a ranch on a slab (yuck) a few blocks from our apartment. The place was musty, old, and small and they wanted $280k!!! I was just amazed. Since then I’ve been really discouraged with the available homes in our area. I love love love this town, but the houses are just not worth the money. The majority of the homes are one-story, lack basements and have garages that are only big enough for one vehicle.

This is totally not what I want. I’m looking for a house with at least 3 bedrooms, 1.5 baths, a basement, 2 car garage, and a decent yard. I’d also prefer the bedrooms to be on the second floor of a two-story home. Well suffice to say, we haven’t found anything comparable within our price range. That is, until tonight, when we started expanding our search to include a town southwest of us called Bolingbrook. Oh my god, there are so many beautiful houses in this town, and they are sooo affordable and huge! Furthermore, most of them were built in the past 10 years. I’m drooling over here. I put together an Excel spreadsheet of the top 20 properties I found and we plan on scoping out the area this weekend. It will be a longer commute for both of us, but I can actually see these homes being something I will be very happy with. I just hope the area is nice. Cross your fingers!

I love that show, House Hunters, on HGTV. In fact, HGTV has become one of my new favorite channels. I wish I had a tivo so I’d never miss an episode. Tonight I was logged into a BBS I frequent and we were watching the show and talking about the places they were looking at. This episode had a couple looking for a home on the northside of Chicago. This one place they looked at was gorgeous, but it still bugged me that it was in a crowded mulit-level building in the city. The unit itself had four floors. I’m not against walking up stairs, but to get between the bedroom, kitchen, living room and office? Uh, no thanks! Plus I don’t think there was a garage or basement. And their balcony … could it be any more narrow? Just ick.

The worst part was that I went online after the show to look at condo/townhome prices in the city and almost died of shock. There are places in the city, on the 27th floor of a highrise, that are going for five MILLION dollars. Is that not insane? Especially when they only have three bedrooms. So crazy! It really makes the places we’ve been looking at online seem dirt cheap. I just can’t imagine what kind of people can afford a place like that where it’s over $4000 a MONTH.

Speaking of houses … I found one online I really liked. No pictures, but it had an address so we were gonna do a drive-by. It had 3 bedrooms, 2 baths, a family room AND a den, a laundry room, fireplace, basement AND 2 car garage. Everything I want and more, plus it was within our price range. I tried pulling it up tonight and it’s already gone. *Cry* I know they say there are a ton of houses out there, but I look every day and I am very discouraged by what I see, so this is a disappointment.

Don’t you just hate it when you have plans and everything gets screwed up? Yea, me too. See, we asked our apartment management to shampoo our carpeting today since we’ve lived here two years and the carpet was getting a bit dirty.

I got home and it was still pretty damp, which sucked, because my plan was to put all the furniture, which is currently in the kitchen and bathroom, back where it belonged and reorganize some stuff so it looks less cluttered. Well that got shot. We turned on the dehumidifier they gave us and went out to run some errands and get dinner since we couldn’t cook as our kitchen is full of furniture.

We got back and the power had gone out long enough to shut the unit down so it really didn’t dry much while we were out. Now it’s getting dry, but it’s also getting late. So who knows when we’ll have time to get to it now. Tomorrow morning we’re going to the Taste of Chicago. Hopefully if we get there when it opens it won’t be so bad or it will be a short trip. I’m not big on crowds but I haven’t been to the Taste in many years and thought it would be something different to do. Then tomorrow evening we have a barbecue to attend. It’s a busy four day weekend!