This might be more difficult than anticipated

So this might be more difficult than anticipated. The real estate agent sent me an email earlier with a link to every house that:

• had a 3 car garage
• had at least 4 bedrooms
• was under $350,000
• built after 2000 
• is located in Rockwall ISD.

Those are pretty broad search terms if you ask me.

The only things that are very limiting are the 3 car garage and the fact that I want a particular school district. That narrows it down to a very large area of a particular county. The school district is fairly large. My guess is that the extreme narrowing factor here is the 3 car garage.

Who would have thought?

What did I get on my list from the real estate agent? I got a grand total of 6 homes. Of those 6 homes, we looked at 1 of them on our last trip. That house was ruled out as a possibility. This narrows the list down to 5 now, I suppose.

There really are only 5 houses in Rockwall ISD that have 3 car garages that are under $350,000 that have 4 bedrooms (or more) and were built in the year 2000 or later? Really?!. Oh that are listed on the market currently…that is the catcher. I am sure there are plenty that meet the above criteria, they are just not listed on the market currently under those criteria.

This is NOT HELPING!?!.

You will notice that things like “gas stove” and “gas dryer” were not even on that list. That was just the 3 car garage that completely narrowed down the list to practically nothing. What is going to happen when we throw in items from the list that is really going to matter? You know the list that is going to get used every single day, multiple times a day?!. Raised eyebrow.

Oh it gets even better. Looking at this list, the square footage on the houses are all over the place. The one that we looked at was smaller than the house we are in. It was not necessarily ruled out because of the square footage. The practical use of the square footage is what matters most.

That being said, we have a piano and a church organ that are going to have to go somewhere and if the rooms are as small as we have already been seeing in the houses thus far, getting those 2 instruments in a single room along with the boys’ computer desks is not going to be as feasible as we had originally planned. We may have to split them into two different rooms. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but we have to have the room to put it in. Since the boys’ computers must be on the ground floor of the house, this is a consideration on what usable space we need to have.

Needless to say I am going armed with measurements for what furniture I have access to currently. We have already put the church organ in storage so I cannot easily get the measurements for it. Kyle has asked for a nicer desk since we threw away the desk that was in the room when we moved things around to paint. We will likely do that and I have the measurements for what desk we are likely to get to replace the desk(s).

One of the houses, I can tell you that while I am going to look at it, I am not sure it is going to work for our needs. It is even smaller than the one we already “ruled out.” It is not just a little bit smaller either. It is almost 500 square feet smaller. Depending on how they have divided that square footage up over the house, it can make a considerable impact on the overall usability of the house. In the pictures, the rooms look really small. There also does not appear to be a game room of any sort. We will see.

I am just surprised that there are so few available with a 3 car garage. I guess that I should not be, but I am. I thought there would be more than that. Shrug.

So that leaves me wondering what to do at this point if a 3 car garage is not what we’re going to get as a primary guideline to limit the search. It limits it too much. Or do we search for a tad older house and see if more results come up? So many decisions.