Lately: Another House?

Now that I'm back in Seattle for the foreseeable future, we're kinda-sorta-maybe looking to buy a house again. After paying a mortgage on the Gig Harbor house, paying rent for an apartment just feels so futile.  And since the prospectus for the area is so positive for the next 10+ years, we decided now is better than later.  My lease doesn't expire for another 6-ish months, but we've put a toe back in to the real estate market.

But you guys, this is crazy.

I started by re-educating myself about the market using current inventory and past comps.  And when I saw what it looks like, my first reaction was:

Prices have increased by like $100,000 across in the last 2 years.  So that took a while to get over (like 2 months).  I kept obsessively researching and apparently I have to read the same thing from about 120 different sources for me to half-heartedly accept that this is where things are at.  

But then I finally made a list of potential properties in multiple areas and starting looking at them one by one.

There were 7 houses (in 4 different neighborhoods) in my first list, and this is basically how looking at them went:

So I took a 2 week break while Steven and I re-assessed whether we really wanted to do this.  In the end, the answer was still yes.  But I had to give myself a little pep talk before making and seeing another list.

Going forward, I decided to work my way through one neighborhood at a time to keep it a little more focused.  But it didn't go very well and I was getting pretty discouraged by what I was seeing:

And then about a month ago, I went back to Gig Harbor for a visit.  

Since then, we've accepted that we'll be happiest on the west side of the Puget Sound.  That area really encapsulates what we love about living in the Puget Sound, and luckily for us it's a little more affordable.  So now we at least know the general area we'd like to stick to.

And we're continuing the hunt for a specific house or property.  But the more we look, the more we're coming around to the idea that our best option is to buy a few acres with a meh (okay, in most cases down-right shitty) house, tearing it down, and rebuilding.

It's a daunting idea, but relatively attractive considering our other options.  And maybe it's just this time of year, but I'm feeling a lot like I did a year ago when I was packing.

So there. In the space of the last 5 months I've gone from "omg I'm so bored in Dubai" to "maybe we'll just build a custom house on the Puget Sound."

Sounds about right.