I am epically stressed right now.  So stressed in fact, that I woke up at 3:45 this morning and can’t get back to sleep.  So here I am, typing away my stress on the blog.  Or well, at least sharing the stress.

So, here’s the dilemma.  My husband and I have been house hunting for about a month now.  In that month we have seen about 20 houses.  We wrapped up our hunting today looking at properties that met our criteria.

At the beginning of the week, my husband and I spent 5 hours one night looking at all of the houses available in quite a few areas around the main city where we live.  We hand-picked these and double-checked location on all of them.

On Friday, I spoke with our Realtor who said that 10 out of 13 houses had been sold, were under contract or taken off the market.  This isn’t the first time in our hunt that we have come across this kind of thing.  Apparently, Realtors aren’t updating their listings in the online MLS database for this area as they should, which ends up in a lot of confusion on the buyer’s part.

So already, I felt deflated about hunting on Saturday.  Still, ever the optimist, I came back lifting my own spirits and thought… “Well, at least we have 3 homes to look at tomorrow.”

In my HGTV “voiceover” voice…

Home number 1 had a wonky back yard and painfully small bedrooms.

Home number 2 left us feeling like it had potential but needed us to re-do the wood floors and buy appliances.

Home number 3 was left in angry shambles from the previous owners and because the house is technically not foreclosed on yet, the home remains a mess (i.e. dirty diapers strewn about, moldy bread and expired mayo just to name a few of the things that were lying around in the cesspool).

So, we’re thinking of buying home number 2.  The thing is, i’m not even remotely excited about it.  I didn’t walk into the house and get the feeling like it was “the one”.  Plus, the kitchen is that narrowly small ranch-style home kitchen, the house itself needs a lot of sweat-equity work (cleanup, paint, wood floors sanded, kitchen re-done, etc.).  My husband is also take-it-or-leave-it on this one as well.  Is that a sign?

There is a house that I feel very strongly is “the one” but my husband doesn’t because it has a 1-stall garage and a small yard.  I should put it out of my mind but I constantly compare these other homes to it.

We don’t want to settle, but at the same time we’re hoping to find a home and move in by the holidays.  At this point, it seems pretty bleak that we will.  And all of this surrounding bleakness is putting a hole in my optimism.

And since we’ve been dedicating the last month and a half to the home search, I am at the point where I kind of want to take a breather.