Exciting, Frustrating....

Well-a lot has happened since I last posted. I am here at our DD's house and the Other Half has gone back home to tie up loose ends. We have a contract on our house-one of two offers we received the day after we listed it and hope to close by the middle of next month! That's exciting!

Now for the frustrating part. This past week, we started looking at houses out in the country in this area, hoping to find something for less money and fix it up. Oh. my. word.  We have looked at some really, uhm, "interesting" houses. It also appears that even with all of our talking and planning about what we wanted to do, we actually had very different ideas about what was going to happen. (As in, my idea of a "fixer upper" home was completely different from his. Turns out that after 38 years, we still don't always communicate very well.)
What brought us back in line with each other was the realization that with what people are asking, and (amazingly) getting for homes here,(even the bad ones) we can buy a few acres of land exactly where we want and build the house we really want for the amount we had budgeted for a home. So...back to Plan A-build a house. It's been a roller coaster week emotionally, but we are both a little more optimistic now. Building a house is familiar territory for us, even though it's been a long time since we've done it. We had done a lot of the work ourselves in the past, but we will be contracting out more of the work this time.
We will have to rent a place while we build our home, but there are several houses for rent here in our daughter's neighborhood, so we may be looking into those.  So-upward and onward, or one step forward and two steps back-it won't be dull whatever happens!