House Hunting

Last year when Joe found out his follow on assignment was in SC we discussed our options of moving on base, or buying a house off base. I did a little bit of looking at real estate websites to get an idea of houses that were for sale. But being over a year away from our actual move I didn't get very far with that. Plus it was hard to look at houses when I didn't really know any of the areas. I knew general areas to look in, but finding the subdivisions etc wasn't an easy thing to do.

I figured the easiest thing to do would just be to live on base. It's what I've done pretty much all my life. No big decisions to really be made about where to live because you only had a few choices...and base living is pretty much the same no matter what base you're at.

Living on base is my 'thing.' I'm comfortable with it and for the most part enjoy it. Sense of security and knowing all your neighbors are military.

I wasn't really ready to buy a house not knowing how long we were going to be in SC anyway.

So last week I followed Joe to SC since he had to report in to his new base. I followed him down there so we could look at base housing together and decide on which one we were going to take of the ones we were offered. Then I was going to head back to MD over the weekend.

Change of plans.

We're now on a house hunting mission to purchase our first home. We were both very disappointed in base housing. Surprisingly the kitchens were the nicest features about the 8 houses we were offered to look at (and being offered 8 keys was our first clue... that many empty houses meant that many families were choosing to live off base). Usually base housing kitchens are really small. These were actually really large with a lot of counter space. It looked promising. Then we saw the bedrooms. They were so small. We would have a hard time finding place for all of our furniture and toys and etc. There is hardly any storage.

So for the last 4 days we've been out looking at houses upon houses upon houses. It's been fun and exciting and exhausting and overwhelming. We have more scheduled to look at tomorrow.

I am so thankful the kids aren't with us because I can't imagine doing this with carting even one of them around from house to house. Thank goodness my mom has it all handled with them!

Not sure if we'll find 'the' one (but we are close) by the time I head back to MD; but we've looked at enough so if Joe needs to continue looking without me he knows what I'm looking for and we're on the same page with that. Plus they can send me lots of pictures and videos of any potentials homes!

I've never spent so much time online looking at nothing but houses ... and no blogging! My goodness am I behind on what's been going on with everyone! I think my bloglines is going to explode!

Crossing my fingers that we do find something to make an offer on tomorrow!