I'm still here

It seems like all I do is post recipes and book reviews of CTBHHM, but mostly that's because I've been head down in property searches. There are over three thousand listings in our general search area, and no matter how you slice it that means finding and evaluating hundreds of listings. This means keeping up with new listings, pre-sorting listings to consider later, looking over my first cut, and then referring my cut list to Allen so we can evaluate and rank our top choices together. There might be an easier to way to do this, but then again I've never been terribly good at collating this sort of information. It's this kitchen vs that backyard vs this other listing price that would let us rip out the kitchen and put in whatever we want. In other words - it's hard! I thought I was pretty flexible, but I'm finding that as I look through houses I'm finding "want to haves" that I never thought about six months ago. I knew a private backyard was important, but I didn't know that I prefer foyers and entryways to walking straight off the porch into the living room. I don't have to have a formal dining room, but five years of apartment living haven't endeared me to the combination living/dining room. The more we talk about what we want to do with our house we realize that we really want a den/rec area so we can set up a ping pong table and have Allen's family over to play games and eat lots of food. Allen needs an office space. We want room for those hypothetical children. (We're working on making them less hypothetical.) In other words - we kind of want a big ol' house :) I say this as a person who hasn't even filled up her two bedroom apartment (well, I have but not with furniture!).

So yeah, packing and house shopping. That's me. I'll try to post another installment on the book review soon though. I have a feeling that if I don't finish it up before we move that it might not get done.