Dude and I took the girls out on a neighborhood exploration mission yesterday. We're meeting with a realtor Tuesday evening to start the house hunting in earnest and we wanted to be sure that we've seen all of the neighborhoods that we need to before that commences. I am psyched! I love house hunting! I love walking through a place and picturing our stuff in it. The problem is that I tend to really love houses that are about $50k above what Dude wants to spend. It doesn't really matter what the price range is - just add $50k and I will fall madly in love with the houses in that bracket, making the ones we can afford seem a little crappy.

Dude and I first hunted for houses together in 1999 or 2000 when we lived in Los Angeles. Housing prices at that point were definitely moving upward and we were looking in "fringe" neighborhoods because those were the only ones in which we stood a chance of finding something. Well, there was this sweet, sweet little house on a corner lot on Redondo Boulevard. I remember it in vivid technicolor. It was a two-bedroom, one-bath Spanish-style bungalow built in 1929 with birds-of-paradise growing by the front door. The floors were all a deep walnut-colored hardwood and there was a huge fireplace in the living room. Beautiful glass French doors led to the formal dining room and the kitchen had a lot of charming original tilework. The fenced-in yard was ENORMOUS with an orange tree and a turtle pond at one end (I even had a turtle - Ernesto - who lived in a stinky little aquarium). A small greenhouse jutted off the back of the garage. It was PERFECT for the two of us. PERFECT. PERFECT. PERFECT. I loved it so much I wanted to cry. It was the house of my married-single (no kids) fantasies. After drooling over every inch of the place for about an hour (including me exclaiming, "Ooooh! Look at this!" repeatedly), we sat in the realtor's car to crunch the numbers. Dude and this guy talked percentage points and down payments while I started decorating plans in my head.

I was trying to decide if the floor lamp we currently had in the living room would work or if we needed something new when Dude turned around and basically slapped me. "I just don't see how we can afford it right now." It was like the words didn't make sense because I had already decided this was our house.

Me: "What?"
Dude: "I don't think we can afford it. The monthly payments seem just out of our range."
Me: "What?"
The Realtor: "Let me go back to the office and come up with some different scenarios and bring them to you later. I'd love to get you in this house."
Dude: "Okay - but I really don't see how this works. It's just too expensive. If it was $50k less, it'd be another story."
Me: "What?"

My throat tightened. I had to fight back tears. I felt like throwing myself on the ground kicking, sobbing and screaming. Seems dumb over a house, right? Yeah, well - you didn't see this house. I made Dude promise that we'd never drive past it and he'd never so much as mention "the house on Redondo" again. I secretly drove past it a couple times over the next few weeks but had to stop because I felt so sad every time. We never did buy a place in LA because prices went so high so quickly that we couldn't keep up. A couple years after the fact, Dude commented that the house on Redondo now seemed affordable. I mentally punched him as hard as I could in the gut.

But Portland is filled with really sweet bungalows with built-ins and fireplaces and claw-foot tubs and backyards with trees. Certainly we'll be able to find one in any of our several neighborhoods-of-choice that is reasonably-priced enough for Dude and polished enough for me. Right?