hoping this will be our house!

We looked around at some other houses today....and we've found a middle ground (I think, anyway). So long as our rental application goes through (she has to check our rental history with Wooten Co. tomorrow), the house will be ours November 1st.

It's a stone bungalow. Donald really likes the stone, I think it's not so attractive. But the inside matters more to me than the outside, since that's the part you look at most. It has 2 bedrooms, 1 full bath, 1 half bath, utility room, living room, dining room, kitchen, full cement-floored basement, detached garage and small yard. The rent is very affordable and there is no pet deposit, which is nice. She'll accept both cats willingly. The previous tenant said utilities run about $80 for all, which is cheaper than our current apartment!

The pros for me were: jetted tub; wood floors; walls that weren't white (we've had all white walls for SEVEN years!); an archway from the living room to dining room; closer to work (1.4 miles from AG H/Q, under 5 miles from my school); neighborhood looks good (houses are well-kept, previous tenant said the neighbors were all nice minus one family); landlady seems nice and non-crazy. Cons for me: no dishwasher (BIG con...); we have to get our own fridge, washer and dryer; creepy basement; garage is detached; kitchen and bathroom definitely on the small side.

The pros for Donald were: the basement (he can have it, I'm staying upstairs!); a hallway (for some reason he really wanted a hallway, the house I loved had no hallways which he hated); neighborhood looks good; fireplace. Cons for him: master bedroom directly off living room (he likes separation of living and sleeping quarters).

As you see, our wants and desires do not have a ton of overlap. That has been challenging. But we both agreed we could happily live in this home. So, hopefully there will be no trouble with the application and we can happily live there!

The only worry is that our current landlady is, as I've said before, crazy. No really. I promise. So, she could screw it up for us. But she has no real complaint against us. We've paid rent on time for almost 7 years, anything we've been asked to do we've done. She does not know about Dash, and he's the only thing she could possibly say we've done that we shouldn't.

Some of our Monday Night Dinner people will have farther to drive, but we will be much closer to a few of them. Hopefully they'll all still feel the drive is worth it! Also, with the wood floors, maybe Hanna will finally be able to be in my house sometimes!

So, fingers crossed!!