Sure, it's a renter's market if you want to pay a lot for a lot of crap! We saw a house today after our class that is going for $2700 for a 3 bedroom 2.5 bathroom with a yard in a pretty good neighborhood. Now, it is kind of expensive, but I was happy to go and see a whole house with a big back yard and all those bathrooms and bedrooms for that price. I figured that maybe it was a the perfect little gem and worth every penny especially if we could have a nursery AND an office/game room not to mention a master bedroom and a back yard to play in. Sometimes the price really does makes sense for what you get. This, however, was not one of those cases!
They say the house has been newly painted but they didn't bother to take the fixtures off the wall before they painted and it seems that they painted with a few different colors and sometimes in the same room. Translation - cheap painter to give the appearance of cleanliness. The living room didn't make much sense at all and the kitchen was so outdated that I felt like we had been transported back to the early 70's when dark cabinets and that horrible linoleum floor that mimics parquet flooring was cool. The back yard was large, but a virtual death trap for kids and pets with debris and random concrete and wood scattered in odd places. The "workroom" that was listed as a bonus room out back was at one point an illegal unit from what I can tell that they have basically let former tenants do ANTYHING they wanted with. Then there is the garage which has been turned into half storage and half a disaster. It looks like at one point they tried to pass it off as the bedroom to a back apartment (let me add that it had no windows and LOOKED like it was half of a garage and not a bedroom). At one point a tenant poured concrete at the base of the garage door and now the door doesn't open so it is basically a useless garage. Now, the plus to this house was that clearly the landlord just wants to rent it and doesn't give a crap about what happens to the house so we really could turn it into a great home and do whatever we wanted to it. However, with a baby on the way, we don't really have the time or the inclination to make someone else's house look and function great for $2700 a month!!
I still stand firm that the perfect place will come along when the time is right so for now, my "nesting" instinct is going to have to take a back seat for a bit and be happy with simply transforming the small nook in our bedroom into the perfect little space for our daughter to spend her first couple of months.
