We’re set to close on the house on Monday. Papers signed today. Check coming soon! Hooray!

But that’s about the only thing that makes any sense in our house hunt. We knew it was going to be tough to find our next house, but we’ve swung and missed 4 times already, and it is starting to sting a little – okay… a lot.

We have been selected as back-up offer on two homes, and didn’t even get a chance to make an offer on two others because they had already accepted something before we even got to our showings.

Each and every time, we have been out-bid when putting in our very “best” offer. What that means is that each offer we’ve made is really above our comfort zone financially, and we still haven’t gotten a house.

And these houses we’re making offers on are only somewhat-close to “in our budget” because they’re either close to train tracks, on a busy street, completely out-of-date, fixers, or goofy in some other way.

It is becoming clear to us that we simply cannot afford what we want in the neighborhoods we’re interested in. We can’t even afford the neighborhood misfits that are kind of close to what we want. This is a surprise to us, because we thought our budget made perfect sense for what we wanted.

We’re agonizingly close to being able to afford what we want/need. $50k more and a whole world of houses would be opened up to us that would fit our needs/desires perfectly. In the world of house prices, that’s not a lot. In our world, that might as well be a million dollars.

It is very stressful and disappointing to feel like you have a ton of money to spend, and it doesn’t buy you what you thought it would buy you. We don’t know what the solution is, so we may end up in Kyle’s mom’s basement for a very long time until a solution becomes clear.

Or maybe we’ll find a house next week. That’s the worst thing… we don’t know! The only thing that is certain is that so far, this house hunt has been more painful than we thought it would be.