boston update - day 2 - sunday

after thoroughly enjoying our good night sleep in the westin, we got up and going pretty early on sunday. after a botched attempt to find the realtor's office on our own, we got directions and made it there. we had a bunch of houses to see so off we went... house #6 was a nice old victorian in quincy. beautiful house just didn't meet most of our needs. the front yard was fenced but not the backyard which doesn't work for the dogs. the rooms were small and none of our furniture would fit. house #7 was also in quincy. it was really cheap but being sold as is. we pulled up to see it but soon found out that it had actually sold the day before. too bad, since it had promise. house #8 had an AWESOME view of quincy harbor - right on the water. unfortunately the house itself was not nearly as nice. it was obvious that the owner "fixed" it up to sell, but only really took care of the cosmetic stuff. dad said the house was in lousy shape and was the worst one we saw. we had really high hopes for house #9. from the internet listing, it looked like an exact replica of our current house (which of course we love.) too good to be true. the house was as awesome as described, but they did fail to note in the listing that the 1/3 of an acre was almost entirely unusable swamp land :( that wouldn't work so hot for us or the dogs. house #10 was also in quincy. it was an ok house but didn't have a garage. it also backed directly up to an apartment complex which makes us wary. we had to take off our shoes to look through this house which was a little weird. nothing really wowed us about this one unfortunately. we liked house #11 quite a bit. it was also in quincy and had a ton of square footage. it has an in-law suite, which we don't really need, but did provide a lot of space. the only issues were that it didn't have any fencing at all (would be pricey to add) and it has been on the market for close to a year which just made us wonder if there was something wrong with it that we just didn't notice. we've ranked this one as #2 for now we LOVE house #12 in milton which just went on the market. it is perfect perfect perfect for us. what is unfortunate is that there is already an offer on it. we could put in an offer too but given that our house hasn't sold yet, it's highly unlikely that our offer would be accepted. wicked bummer as this was our #1 favorite house from the weekend. house #13 was in milton and was built in 1765. it has a ton of character but just needs more work than we can handle (both time and money wise.) jeremy could hardly stand up straight since the ceilings were so low. house #14 in milton was a similar story. lots of charm and space. good bones and could be an awesome house if you have the time and money to put in to it. unfortunately, it was already close to the top of our budget and my dad estimated that it needed another $100K of work to make it right. so at this point we have one house that we love but can't have. there are 2 others that we'll keep on the list but aren't ready to commit to. we're just going to keep our eye on what's out there but we feel stuck until our house sells. somewhat depressing since we loved the house in milton but just couldn't get in fast enough. we feel like we're at a disadvantage being so far away - we just can't act as fast as the local house hunters. :( the good houses are going to get gobbled up before we could even see them. we're going to get stuck choosing from the leftovers :( and add on top of that - the train ride home sucked. the train was filled to capacity due to the weather and all the airline cancellations. we couldn't sleep sprawling across multiple seats so it was difficult to get any sleep at all. the train also got in almost 2 hours late because of the bad weather along the way.