emmne | House Hunting Some More

Found some possibilities, then found a cool but incomplete option (a collection of historic buildings that would have been a great museum if we could find a house anywhere in the area, even though it requires a massive amount of work to repair the neglect and bad decision-making that has preceded out interest) but couldn't find a tolerable house/land package anywhere near. Everyone seems to insist that to get what we want in any tolerable combination (and we are trying to be very flexible, knowing that there are plenty of changes that can be made over time if there is any viable core to work with) will cost more than its worth as well as more than we have available to spend. If there's no land worth the notice, they think taking out some walls and spiffing up the kitchen magically doubles the value. If there is decent land, then they think the land and location make up for the dumpy little house, even though land in the area just isn't going for that much and it isn't even good land. And sometimes the price is lower, but never enough lower for the pitiful little unimproved house that isn't of a deign easily expanded and small property at the same time. Really, they think they should magically get a huge profit just for owning the place a little while? The cool package options gave us time to eliminate all of the first possibilities from consideration for their faults and not living up to the cool half package.

So we've reconsidered what we are looking for, again (you can't query for multi-variable relationships in a house search, you have to define one sort of combination of land and house sizes and price ranges unless you want to go through hundreds of totally unacceptible combinations. So, instead of a larger property and midsize house, we're looking for a smaller property with a big house, so that we can take out walls to get bedrooms, library etc that are a decent size, and will deal with the reduced acreage with trees and other means.