Saturday and Sunday, Jill was here and we looked at about a dozen houses.

The very last one we looked at, I had already ruled out, since it wasn’t in Decatur. But it was SO beautiful, I asked Jill to look anyway.

She fell in love too. It was a magnificantly restored, large, craftsman/mission style house on a corner double lot, across the street from a huge church. Hitting every traffic light, it took 20 minutes from work. It was a little above our budget…but we fell in love, and our real estate agent assured us that Atlanta isn’t like DC: you offer below the asking price here.

So we made an offer. And I started researching craftsman/mission/art deco interiors.

Unfortunately, with a few back and forth efforts, we weren’t able to reach a mutually satisfying price. So we aren’t buying the beautiful house.

After a day of licking our wounds (Tuesday), we are snapping out of our sadness and making an offer on our second choice house. SCH for short.

The SCH has been painted in colors that are even more awful than they look in the pictures. Most of the common living area is an agitating shade of spicy brown mustard. The greens are also more lurid than they look. And it has a nearly unusable back yard, a small patch of ground on a not quite 45 degree angle.

But the interior has a nice flow to it, the hardwood floors are fantastic, and the master bathroom is not to be believed. I think it’s the size of the smallest bedroom in our condo, with 2 sinks, a deep, huge soaking tub, a separate shower, and a built in vanity area. Oh, and a separate WC.

SCH also has a great master closet, which we can get "californiaized" so that it will hold all of Jill’s (and my) t-shirts without them toppling over in scary stacks. (At present, they occupy ~9 square feet of shelf space, in stacks from 8-15 inches high.)

And the list price is 60k lower than the beautiful house. So we can easily manage the cost of repainting, interior especially, but exterior too. AND I am envisioning an imaginative cascade of deck area transforming the unusable back yard into a cool, creative, fun, surprising space. Even better, SCH is only 5 blocks from the MARTA.  So I will be taking public transportation to work most days!!!

We do still have a 3rd choice house…but hopefully it won’t come to that. (That one has a great yard, but a dated and dark interior, and is not walking distance to the MARTA.)