House hunting.
I never knew that there were so many scary houses in Winchester. I don't mean houses that just have crap wallpaper or really gross ugly carpet. I mean houses that when you walk into them make you feel like some sort of ax murdering serial killer lived there. One house was so incredibly tiny! The two main bedrooms shared a connecting closet, the floor was warped and sort of buckled in, and the only bathroom was meant for someone under five feet to be able to stand in comfortably. I only wish I had pictures to really prove just how gross some of these houses were! While we picked up a ton of flyers for houses we weren't able to go into, out of the ones that we did see the inside of, there was literally just one we liked but it was about $60k out of our price range. Even with it being a buyers market and most people desperate to sell, I doubt I could get them down that much.
We went up on Saturday to go with the boy's mom to West Virginia to look at new housing developments. However, his dad got us distracted with older homes and we drove around all day going to open houses and just driving by looking for for sale signs. After seeing some of these houses I'm pretty sure that our best bet would be to go with a brand new house in West Virginia instead of paying about the same for a used house in Winchester. His parents friend's company will start building some houses in Martinsburg sometime in between December and January. This isn't being advertised yet which means we would be first in to pick which lot we want. If construction takes four-ish months then we're looking at April - May time line for delivery of the houses which is exactly the time we wanted to move. We've only been able to see floor plans but there are finished houses in Winchester of the exact same models so we'll probably go up there and look through those to see if we even like the layout. I have a lot of large furniture, including a $3,000 kitchen table that is being custom made as a Christmas present from the boy's parents which means we need a eat in kitchen or I'll have to make it our dining room table and be forced to give up my mom's table, which I don't really want to do. I should mention here that when we went looking for kitchen tables I was only expecting for them to spend $1,000 max. I nearly passed out when the total bill was rung up at three grand. I also wasn't expecting to have to wait until Christmas to get it either, which still leaves me without another table for Thanksgiving this year.
Mike, the idiot landlord, still hasn't returned our calls to speak with him which means we have no idea what his policy or reaction to us moving out earlier then our lease date will be. But he's an asshat so it's to be expected he wouldn't return our calls. Jackass. He's such a cheap bastard that he'll probably want to charge us a ton of money to move out because he might, gasp, go without income on the townhouse for a few weeks! There are things in this townhouse that need to be fixed while there is no one living here but I doubt he'll do it.
Blar now I'm just rambling. I never thought I would willingly want to move to West Virginia. But I also never thought that most houses around here would go for half a million. It's kind of our only choice if we want to stay in this general area, even if it's not exactly this area because it's about two hours away. I know there isn't a lot up there at the moment but with all these new housing developments springing up everywhere hopefully a lot more businesses will be opening up too.