Let the hunt begin!

As of last night, the Anderson family is officially house-hunting. And what a hunt it is so far!

Look at this one. It looks ok, right? A little small, maybe, but a cute house. Well, now picture it with bare patches all over the house where the paint has peeled off, broken panes in every window, crumbling columns on the patio, and instead of that nice, lush grass in the front and side yards, a bare patch of dirt littered with cigarette butts, a clump of human hair, and one shoe. Because that's what it really looks like.

Oh, but that's only the outside of the house! The inside is just as nice. The realtor warned me that it might "need new carpet". I thought ok, maybe it's just a little bit worn. But she meant the carpet was covered with ground in candy, dirt, and who knows what else--in every single room. Add that to the dead-body/urine smell that hits you when you first walk through the door, and we were sure fairly early on that it wasn't the house for us. But, being our first showing, we weren't sure of protocol, so we pretended we might consider it and looked at the rest of the house just to be polite.

The ground floor consisted of a good-sized living room, a dining room, a teeny kitchen, a utility room, a bathroom, and the two smallest bedrooms I have ever seen (I think we could fit one twin bed in each, and that's it). The kitchen and dining room actually looked ok, mostly because they had tile floors and you can't grind filth into tile, but the rest of the rooms were horrible. Then we went upstairs, to the "third bedroom", which was really just the entire upstairs with a clothes bar hung along one wall. And a fireplace. The urine smell got worse upstairs, so we hurried back down as soon as we could, but not before Tempe could pick up a jelly bean and try to eat it.

Then we went into the yard. It was a pretty big yard, lined with grape vines and a cute picket fence, but it needed completely new sod. At the other end of the yard was the gravel driveway and crumbling cinder block garage. I thought a hobo might live in it, but if one does, he was out for the evening.

As we went back into the house, through the utility room, we noticed two things: mold all over the wall, and a large trapdoor. "Does that go down to a basement or cellar or something?" I asked the realtor. She said it was probably just a dirt crawl space, but when she opened it, we found a full flight of stairs going down into a lit, cement room (the strangest part is that the electricity was turned off in the rest of the house....). On the stairs there were several pairs of little girl panties. We didn't go down (and last night I had horrible thoughts: what if there was a little girl down there being held prisoner, and when she heard us she hoped that we would find her, but we didn't go down...?)

Well, if we had an extra $20,000, maybe we would consider it. It had beautiful architectural details, an amazing view of the mountains, and a great location--a block east of a Trax station and in a nice neighborhood. But, like Jason pointed out, if we had an extra $20,000, we would probably just buy a nicer house.