Again. Being with me on a Saturday morning down here is a bit like being on a grail quest. I’ve convinced myself that the perfect old house is out there, somewhere, taunting me just over the horizon with it’s agonizingly French accent. It takes a leap of faith to make an offer on a house. Making an offer on a house in a state when I don’t yet technically have a job is more like taking a header into the Gorge of Eternal Peril. Yet somehow I think it’s what I am about to do.

This house was the second of three I visited today and was the only one that was ever really in the running. I could go into several long diatribes about the evil things people do to old houses, but that will wait for another night.

Suffice to say that the pictures don’t come close to doing justice to this place. At 106 years old, she was built when Victoria sat the throne of the British Empire and William McKinley was President of the United States, gutted in the last five years with all major electrical, plumbing, and mechanical systems replaced, 2000 square feet put under fresh roof, floors refinished, original trim restored… and for sale at the asking price of $135,000 in a sleepy Southern town of 10,000 (more on the town will follow).

I’m plotting and planning… with a healthy dose of self-doubt and second guessing… the path that wends its way through giving up my seldom visited apartment, moving a substantial amount of “stuff” into dad’s basement and setting up temporary quarters in his guest room to use when I’m required to be in Washington, and finally arrives at buying a house in commuting distance of a job I might actually be assigned to three months from now.

It all sounds perfectly mad and if I weren’t living it, I would probably think I had finally gone ‘round the bend. I’ve had incredible luck with finding places to hang my hat in the past…. Sweet Jesus, I hope it holds for one more round.

You can’t see it, but I’m knocking on wood out here, folks. 😉