Now that we have contacted a realtor, our house hunt is kicked off into high gear. I still don’t have a really good idea of where the neighborhoods are cheap-but-ok or cheap-and-slummy, but I think our guy has a good idea. We saw like 6 townhouses yesterday and will probably see 5 more on Monday.

We are looking for a townhouse that is about the same square footage as our condo (1100 or a bit more), and has inside laundry, a ground floor entry and no upstairs neighbors, 2 br, 1.5-2.5 baths, and want to pay around 450k. We looked at a couple nice ones out Alum Rock, and out Berryessa, both east of 680, which are the two current front-runners (actually three because there were two identical mirror-image units out Berryessa). Tomorrow, we will probably look at some townhouses around 85 between 17 and 87. I don’t know which is worse, commuting up/down 85 or commuting on 237/680, probably about a wash.

The scary thing is we are looking to about double our house payment. So we probably won’t be going out to dinner much, but at least we will have a nice kitchen and can start cooking for ourselves.

I am sitting here eating Lucky Charms and drinking coffee with Irish Cream flavoring. I wonder if Lucky the Leprechaun ever hits the heather cream a bit when the kids aren’t around hassling him for cereal.

Oh well. Must do some paperwork and get caught up on quicken; I want to run the numbers and find out if we can really afford this move.

gregc