House Hunting

Trevor and I have been busy house hunting the last few weeks. Well, we’ve been busy with a bunch of stuff: we’ve both been traveling a lot for work, we’ve had several visitors come hang out/ stay with us, and educating ourselves about housing in DC and Northern VA.
Our initial plan was to find a fixer-upper in DC. I really wanted to live near the city and public transportation and the homes in Washington DC have amazing character.
After lots of seraching, and trying and number crunching we began to realize that this was not going to happen. Even though the real estate bubble is bursting, and people are coming to their senses in pricing their homes, the cost is still prohibitive. Lots are tiny, street parking is usually the only option, and the cost of rehabilitating some of these homes would be astronomical. Many are 100+ years old and we could not afford a rehabbed home.
Condos are not an option. They are so overpriced it is kind of a joke, and I hope the developers are going to be bit in the butt soon for the evil they have wrought. The market is totally flooded and unreasonable. A condo seems to be a more permanent purchase than a single-family home because they are getting to be impossible to resell.
We turned our thoughts back to the suburbs of Northern Virgina. At first, I was mortified because we thought we would have to settle for some way, way out there suburbs that were pretty desolate and lonely, in my opinion.
This was not the case, however, as we hooked up with a very knowledgeable realtor. He’s been great to work with and has shown us that we can afford something in dreamy Fairfax county. Fairfax is the second fastest growing county in the US and is known to have an outstanding school system. It encompases what I have heard refered to as the “Silicon Valley” of the east, and I buy it, there are tons of tech jobs around here.
Anyway- that is that. It has been like a second job trying to learn about a) all that goes into buying a house and b) what to do in this crazy, crazy, ugly market.