After being at my parents house just 4 days I left the kids with them {first time EVER leaving the kids} and flew to California for 2 days to find a house. I was lucky enough to have my mother in law with me. We met in Vegas on our connecting flights and flew to California together. I had a whole list of houses that I had looked up online and was ready to see. Lots of realtors would not make an appointment to show us houses or let us take the key until we had driven past the property. This annoyed me, but when we arrived in 29 Palms I understood why they did this. I had lots of houses on my list that were nice houses with lots of upgrades, but were in the midst of a not very nice neighborhood. I mean a nice house surrounded on both sides 5 houses down with run down, chain link fence, car on the front lawn, scary dog in the back yard, needed to call a handy man and have some major repairs done, sofa on the porch kind of houses. WOW! I was shocked. Who built these nice houses in these neighborhoods?? After crossing these houses off our list we went to the realtor offices and got keys and looked at lots of houses. We crossed some off our list and after looking at the lists in the realtors office we added more to our list. All day long we kept trying to say this house is #1 or #2 or #3 or we like these 2 the same, etc. We looked at a house that we were truly considering only to return the key and find out someone had put money down on it while we were out looking at it. We looked at a house in a neighborhood I did not originally have on my list. When we drove into the neighborhood it had a nice, cozy safe feel to it. On our way to the house that brought us to the neighborhood we saw another for rent sign. I called the phone number on the sign and we were able to see it right away. I loved it, but it was a little higher than we wanted to pay. After 5pm when the realtor offices were closed and we couldn't look at the inside of any more houses we drove out to see the Marine Core Base {we are Navy, but the Navy take care of the Marines.} Then we drove over to Joshua Tree National Park and then past some more houses. By 8pm we were eating dinner in Pizza Hut {there are very little options in this town} and we were exhausted. We were both on 6am flights that were taking off from airports 2 hours away from our houses, we had looked at more houses than I could remember and we were thourally confused. I was not sure we were going to be able to make a decision and get the paperwork done before we needed to leave for the airport the next afternoon. We checked into our hotel. Looked at a few houses online, did not even turn on the TV brushed our teeth and went to bed. We were both asleep within seconds.
This is what we could get for $1000...
The Base...
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| Josh's clinic |
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| LOVE the palm trees |
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| officer housing |
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| I thought these signs were pretty funny! |
The next morning we were refreshed and could think about things more clearly. We looked at 3 more houses crossed 1 off our list and moved the other 2 to the top 5 in the running. Ate some breakfast, called the base housing office to find out how much they charge for officer housing. This opened our eyes a little more. We realized that they charged the same that the nice houses in the nice neighborhoods were asking. Then we narrowed it down to 3 then 2 then I called the owner of the house we happened to see the for rent sign in the yard and were able to see the day before to negotiate rent and lease length. I waited for her and her husband to discuss it, before making my decision. I liked that house, I like the neighborhood, Josh would like the location, it was close to base but not too close, there is a bike path from the neighborhood to base {Josh would LOVE that!} She called me back and said that they would lower the rent to my asking price but would not lower the lease. {We originally thought that we would keep our option to move on base open...there is a 6-9month wait...so we wanted a 6 month lease but they wanted a 1 year lease.} They did not want the lease to end during the winter months when there were not very many people moving into the area. After talking to Josh on the phone I decided to go with this house because of the previously mentioned things, and we decided that the year lease didn't matter because we are not going to want to move again anyway!
This is the house we decided to rent....
In this kind of neighborhood...
Whew! By 12pm I had signed a tentative lease, paid our deposit ate lunch and checked out of the hotel. 2 hours ahead of schedule! I was so relieved that we had a house to move into when we got there and an address to tell the movers to move our stuff to. The night before I did not see this happening! We saw an outlet mall on our way to the airport so we stopped to kill a little time! Thanks Sherri for coming with me. I could not have done it without you {or the GPS}!
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