The house hunt has begun. This time the search is drastically different from than our first house for a number of reasons.

That main difference between then and now: we thought we'd be in Atlanta forever. Looking back I know see that this was a naive and ridiculous thought. This time around, we know it won't be our forever house. Maybe we could be surprised but Wisconsin is not close to any family and we know we want our roots a bit closer to home.

With our first house we had no idea what to look for, with our Wisconsin house we know WAY too much about being a homeowner and are skeptical about every detail. For example: we just went to see a house and it had this cozy, feeling but the house also seemed to be angled strangely. If we were first time buyers we might think, oh its just settling and thats how the house is. NOPE now we know it could be structural issues NOT a quaint Hobbit like feel to the house. Yeah, we ran out of that house. PS the house's main support beam was cut and being held up by structural jacks... no thank you!

With our first house we bought bigger and decided we could grow into it. With this house, because we don't know length of stay we are buying much smaller. Like half the size. 

With our first house, we bought a fixer upper that we could live in as we fixed. With this house, it will either be move in ready or we will fix it before we actually move in. 

There are a number of items we are looking for that we didn't want or even think of having in our last house. I love that we're really weighting all options and hopefully getting exactly what we want but I can't help but have this exasperated, desperate defeated feeling like we will never find a house that checks all the boxes. There is not a lot on the market in the area we are looking, the houses are much older and need a good amount of work. The taxes are higher and the schools aren't great. 

One option we are playing with is seeing if our landlords would be willing to sell us this house. It needs work and the floor plan of the house isn't quite what we're looking for and theres no way of making it what we want. If we ended up in this house we’d be settling and because of that we are searching.