How (not) to buy a house

A few weeks ago, Eric, Emerson and I went to Tampa to check it out and see if we could buy a house before we get there on July 31.

Here's how we came up with our list of houses to look at:

We started with houses in South Tampa. This is an area that is near the University (short commute for Eric) and has the best public schools (we heart education).

Then we filtered by minimum number of bedrooms (3), minimum square footage (1,500) and maximum price (use your imagination). The minimum price should have removed all of the tear-downs but where it didn't, we took those off ourselves.

Then we cross referenced this list against the city flood zones and crossed off all the ones with any significant flooding risk.

Then we removed houses with asbestos or other known toxicity issues.

Then we took off the ones on major streets or within noise pollution distance of the highway.

Then Eric secretly took off all of the houses with decorative wood paneling.

We were left with 8 houses to look at, with a ninth that came on the market the last day we were there.

And to be honest, they were all dogs.

We really, really tried to make ourselves love them but it just didn't quite happen. And though we put in an offer on one of them, I think we (or maybe just I) may have been secretly relieved when it didn't work out.

Our new plan is to rent when we get there for a little while and keep house shopping. While on the one hand living in limbo for a while sounds excruciating, on the other hand we won't have committed to a home we don't at least like a whole lot if not love.