We're back and we're putting the pedal to the metal

on the home repairs/remodeling. Fort Collins was wonderful (again). Steve and I loved the service at the UU church and we met several new unschooling moms and kids and felt so welcomed and at home with them!
We spent two days frying our brains with home tours, and saw several places that were 80 percent right (there's one I'd want to put a bid on if we had our house on the market already, but I can live with it if it gets sold before we're ready. I *loved* the views off the back deck of the foothills though.)
We also saw one that was absolutely the most frightening house I have ever been in. Good lord. From the outside it looked like a small, older one-story place on a fabulous 2-acre lot in the city. Inside, it was straight out of Silence of the Lambs -- every wall stripped to studs blackened by time and veined with exposed wiring. You could look up through the rafters, past enormous spider webs to the roof shingles. You walked on subflooring covered in places with old astro turf. The kitchen was rudimentary at best. The bathroom was horrible. Down two stone steps to a dirt floor addition, a dark room with a desk and open closet eerily neat, with clothes hung perfectly on hangers. Steve actually ventured into the basement. I had to flee the house as I was quickly becoming terrified for no good reason. The basement actually frightened Steve as well. He said it was chock full of junk and you had to walk through narrow, winding pathways to eventually find a couple of cots with bunched up sleeping bags on them as though someone was actually sleeping down there. When he came back up and went into the dirt-floored addition, he said he saw two giant Mardi Gras masks and a full-head, leather mask of a fly's face, complete with bulging eyes and working pincer mandibles. I tell you, I will never consider living in that part of town after being in that place. I'm convinced they're going to turn up bones when someone eventually buys and razes that house to put something else on the property. It took some serious effort to shake off the vibes of that place. (Our real estate agent joked that it made the Buddhist house look turnkey. She also said she had never, ever been in a house like that before. You can't even call it a house. It was a shack. An insane, dark, falling-down shack.)
As far as vibes go, while the Buddhist house has some good vibes, it is off the table for us -- turns out there's not only roof issues, but foundation issues also. What we found is that we'll probably go ahead and get a small mortgage to get a larger lot and home and, sigh, spend our energies updating it once we move in, as if we aren't already burned out on that sort of project.
I'm really excited about this move -- there's such an energy to Fort Collins that our suburb here entirely lacks, but it's not fast paced or terribly urban either. Downtown is utterly charming. We got a taste of the extreme and changeable Colorado weather while we were there -- it actually snowed/rained around midnight the first night we were at my sister's house and was pretty cold and cloudy for much of our visit, but the last two days were lovely.
Off to get going on a half-finished project or two...