Going from the Hunted to the Hunter

This weekend, we made our first foray into the world of house hunting in Richmond. I must say that it was a nice change to be on the other side of the home buying process, even if just for a couple hours. We enjoyed being the ones to go through people’s houses at a great inconvenience to them and judge their homes.

There were some special ones that do stick out in my mind….first, there was the “looks nothing like the very nice picture on the internet” house. This house looked stunning on the internet – so much so that I put it on our list to see even though it was slightly out of our price range. As we were driving up, our realtor said, “When I spoke to the realtor for this house, she said they were doing some work on it now that they’ve managed to get the residents out”…. Managed to get them out? “Well she said they had pet possums that they kept inside”….what?!? And believe me, it smelled like pet possums inside. When we walked through the front door, we were greeted by men with white masks in white body suits – never a good sign. So we promptly turned around and walked out.

Then there was the “Brady Bunch house”. Everything about this house screamed 1970s…from the long mustard yellow shag carpet to the smell of Pierre Cardin cologne wafting through the house, to the bright yellow laminate countertops in the kitchen. What made this house really special was the room over the garage, which I will affectionately call “Greg’s room”. Remember how Greg had the room that was weird in shape and had beads in the doorway? Well there were no beads, but this room was something else – long, bright red shag carpet covered the floor and the entire back wall was mirrored – even the door leading into the room was mirrored – I’ve never seen anything like it. We also chose to leave this house in a hurry.

Now don’t get me wrong – we did see a couple of houses that were very nice and are definite possibilities…but I guess it’s kind of like the way people say “they should make you get a degree or go to a class before you have a baby” – they should also make you go to a class before you put your house on the market.