I haven’t been house hunting for 16 years and the fact I’m doing it again in my 40s pretty much sucks rotten eggs.

We need to find a house closer to my husband’s new job (and my parents) and finding one that is in our budget and not 200 years old is almost impossible in this county it seems. This is an old county, without a lot of old people and old houses, which I love, don’t get me wrong. But some of these old houses are about ready to fall over and the amount needed to fix them up again well exceeds our budget at this season in our life.

It’s depressing not only to look at house after house online, or in person, and either hate the house or love it but either not be able to afford it or losing it to someone else. One house was perfect for us and only five minutes away from my parents and we rushed to set up an appointment to see it but before we could even have a tour they accepted an offer from someone else. I threw up my hands and swore off looking at houses for a while after that one. I won’t lie, I’m still in mourning over losing that one and keep praying the financing falls through for the buyer.

Then there are the houses you think might be great until you realize there is only one bathroom and it’s on the second floor, which would be fine for now but if anyone injures themselves or we are still living there when my husband and I get old it wouldn’t be pleasant. I don’t want to be hauling it up the stairs 50 times a day if my bladder falls apart on me in my old age like the bladders of many female family members in my family.

Looking at the real estate websites in our area have been painful, not only because there aren’t a lot of nice houses to choose from in our budget, but because agents around here apparently have no idea how to take photographs of homes for their websites. The photos are often either blurry or only include images of the outside of the house. If there are only images of the view from the house or the outside we usually guess that the house is a complete dump inside.

My 13-year old son and I have been looking at some homes online and here are some of his best lines after viewing some of them:

“And here is where we keep the hostages …”

“What’s with that wallpaper? People if you’re going to put it up fully commit and add it to the whole room.”

“That house looks like somewhere they’d film a horror film.”

Needless to say, this house hunting journey has not been fun. It is also not lost on us that selling our house, which we haven’t been able to fix up as much as we would have liked over the years, has the potential to be equally soul-sucking.