After my latest update, I did find some houses I liked. One required some work on the flooring and repairing the ceiling, but the cost was so reasonable, the sellers just wanted out of it as is. That got snatched up before I had a chance to even decide on it - too bad, the finishes were just gorgeous and the kitchen to die for.

We thought we were going to put an offer in on another house we looked at - actually liked it better than the original new house we were going to get. This house was a tad bigger, and had a gorgeous kitchen and family room, had 5 bedrooms and they were roomy, plus the game room, living room, etc. The yard was enormous, and it was in a posh neighborhood. It was a foreclosure, and it needed a really good cleaning, plus all the carpets upstairs needed replacing, and it needed fencing. For the price they were offering it at we felt it was totally worth it. When we prepared to put the offer in, we found out the taxes were around 8,000 a year - holy cow! That made the payment jump up like crazy, so we were going to have to go in quite a bit lower to compensate and still be able to afford it. The other agent then told us that it was owned by Countrywide and they would not accept ours or anybody else's offer without a pre-approval letter using Countrywide as the lender. We had the pre-approval from our lender, but no, we were told they won't even respond to an offer unless it's through them. We walked away. We weren't about to start playing those games, and with the cost of the taxes on top of that we knew we shouldn't even go there. It was shame, such a beautiful house, but it would have been worse to worry over it.