Results from Our Househunting Adventure.

McComb, Mississippi greeted us at 12:45 EST early Friday morning. After a nine and a half hour drive from Athens, we pulled into the Holiday Inn Express parking lot and headed to our room. Getting a good night's sleep would be essential if we were going to make it through the days to come. 

For the past nine months Justin and I have made a running list of all the things we wanted in our next home. It was a pretty long list - fireplace, workshop, front porch (the bigger the better!), a dishwasher, a stove without coil burners, a refrigerator with an ice-maker, an indoor laundry room, an kitchen island, and separate bathrooms. We also have a strong preference for historic homes, because they have so much curb appeal and character (at least when they are well-maintained). We knew our wish list was pretty demanding and we were prepared to make a couple of concessions on some of the less important items.

We began our search with high hopes, having scoured the internet for the previous week for homes that matched our criteria and fell within our meager price range. We scheduled an appointment with a real estate agent for Friday afternoon and were prepared to spend all weekend searching for the perfect home.

Our cunning real estate agent started us off with the biggest, most beautiful home that we could possibly have afforded. When we say big and beautiful that's what we mean - 3800 sq.ft., 4 bedrooms, 3 baths, courtyard, 3 car garage, huge Greek columns on the front porch, 12 ft ceilings, and fine woodwork throughout the house. Of course the home was not without its flaws. Right behind the lot there was a big brick quadplex with broken windows, blaring rap music, and beer bottles littering the ground. Nevertheless, it was obvious that the house would cost a half million dollars if it were on a hill in the country. We were smitten!

The rest of the day we discovered that the thousand words a picture paints are not the same words you would use to describe a scene in person. Many of the homes we looked at were either good homes in bad neighborhoods or bad homes in good neighborhoods. We were getting more and more discouraged with each passing hour. Our real estate agent dropped us off at our hotel just as it was getting dark. We had a lot on our mind and a lot to discuss, but there was still one house we were anxious to see.

 Our real estate agent was not able to show us this house, because it was listed on forsalebyowner.com. We had contacted the seller earlier in the week and arranged to see the home on Saturday, but we simply couldn't stand it any longer, and we asked to see it on Friday. He called us back about an hour after we got to the hotel and said we were welcome to come and see his house as long as we didn't hold it against him that it hadn't been cleaned. We eagerly agreed, but we were nervous that the house would not be as perfect as it seemed to be in the pictures (especially after our experiences earlier in the day).

As we walked through the front gate and into the back yard, Justin and I exchanged subtle smiles - we both knew immediately that this house was "the one". Our tour of the inside confirmed our first impression. It had everything we wanted! Justin was smitten with the huge two-car garage that would serve as his workshop. I couldn't stop drooling over the wrap-around porch with the blue-painted ceiling.

We had already agreed to meet the real estate agent on Saturday morning for another day of house-hunting, but it was hard to give anything else a fair chance knowing that the one we really wanted would be shown to two other people that day. As soon as we parted ways with our real estate agent, we grabbed lunch and made arrangements to do a more thorough inspection of our dream home. Justin spent two hours crawling under the house and through the attic and walking around the outside of the house and the garage. Meanwhile, I was inside playing with the homeowners' children and making friends with the wife. I was getting tips on good shopping locations while Justin took care of business. He finally emerged from under the house covered in dust and ready to make a deal. Without much haggling, we agreed upon a price that made us all happy. We met again after supper and signed a contract.

Without further ado, I present our dream home:

 

We stole these last few pictures from the website: