Househunting and Detachment

You know your heart is likely to be broken at least once when you are house hunting.

Here’s the thing. You know you need to be detached, to stay cool and not get involved. Don’t give your heart away to a house until the keys are in your pocket. But there’s the catch. Unless you feel some passion about a house, unless you can see yourself and your family living in that house, your children playing in that yard, unless you can see yourself cooking dinner in that kitchen and placing your bookcases there and there and there and there, unless you feel like it could be home, you aren’t going to be willing to commit to making an offer.

This weekend we made an offer on a house that had been on the market for six months. Coincidentally they received another offer on the same day. And the other buyers could go higher so they won. Now it’s back to the awful grind of house hunting. Which is really, really not fun with two small children, one of them a nursing infant. Especially when you are looking at neighborhoods an hour away from your current residence. (We’re moving because Dom’s job moved this summer and he’s currently got a commute of more than an hour.)

And in our price range at least half the houses we look at are wrecks, dives, toxic waste dumps, a do-it-yourselfer’s dream come true, or otherwise dispiriting. We don’t have time or resources to devote to a fixer-upper. We need to move and we need a place that is ready to be moved in to, barring minor details like coats of paint. Which means slim pickings and probably more heartbreak in store.

Bella has learned realtorese in the past weeks. As we walk through a house she chants: “master bedroom… three bafrooms… here’s another room.” And the same as we browse through listings on the computer. It would be charming if I weren’t getting so stressed about the whole moving thing.

Our lease was up in June. We were hoping to have moved before we needed to put the air-conditioners in for the summer. Now we are looking at taking them out. Our landlord has been generous in allowing us to go month-to-month; but I feel we are trying his patience. And really at this point an extra helping of guilt doesn’t help.

I never finished unpacking and moving in last summer because I knew this place was going to be temporary and because of the whole first trimester blahs that made me think, “why bother?” I’m ready to move on from this half-settled state. But we just can’t find a house. And I’ve fallen in love twice and had my heart broken twice. I don’t know how much more of this I can take. I’m sure there’s a lesson in here about trust in God and detachment from material things; but I don’t feel like learning right now. I just want to be done with it and in my own home.