So remember the house I mentioned a while back that we turned down because of the potential for the fans in the adjacent grocery store to be too loud? Yeah, turns out they’re pretty much silent, so the house would have been totally fine.
That said, I still think we made the right decision. Given the potential for badness there (and the difficult resale that would come with it), we did the best we could with the information we had. It’s just a shame that the house didn’t come on the market a month or so later.

But I think that house is now destined to become the house by which we measure all other houses, because it really was the perfect house. (Certainly everything else we’ve looked at since then has been compared to it and found to be lacking.)

We ended up signing a new lease on the current apartment, so we’re good through next July. Which means we now have more time to look at houses without being pressured into buying due to our lease being up soon.

We looked at another one yesterday (a few blocks West of us instead of North). It had all the right features: 4 bedrooms (actual usable bedrooms), a garage, a reasonable (but on the small side) yard, 1.5 bathrooms, the most amazing kitchen… but for some reason it just didn’t click. There was a while where we were tempted to go for it anyway, because it was certainly “good enough”, but I think our agent ultimately talked us out of it because it wasn’t “right” for us, even if it would probably have been fine. (The shared driveway to the garage and the need to repaint pretty much the entire downstairs were the main negative points for me.)

Speaking of which, I want to call out our agent, Joan Elko, because she is really the best buyer’s agent ever.
We’ve been looking for things with her now since February, and in that time and the many houses we’ve seen, we’ve never felt pressured into anything; really, the opposite… she’s better at talking us out of decisions that probably ultimately aren’t right than trying to talk us into buying or looking at things that aren’t right. (Like how she talked us out of the house yesterday, saying that we “shouldn’t settle” but should instead find and buy the house that we really want.)
Besides that, she knows her stuff. I feel like she has an excellent sense of house values (given that we’ve seen final sale prices now for some houses that we looked at with her, even though things have been crazy this year in the seller’s market with a lack of supply), and she also has really good knowledge of houses… like we’ll walk into a place and she’ll start rattling things off about the house and windows and floors and things that need work.
I also feel bad for her given how much work she’s done for us (over 4 months), and we’re no closer now to a place than we were then. We’re probably the worst clients ever. :P (Certainly one of the pickiest.)

So we’ve had nothing but good experiences with our agent, even if the search itself has been less than ideal.

The house hunt continues.