House hunting sucks

Josh and I have somewhat been looking for a house.  I say somewhat because we don't know if we will even stay in Utah.  Did you know Engineers make more money out of Utah than in it?  If given the opportunity I think we might leave, if we can move to a place were housing costs are roughly the same as they are here.  But Josh currently has a job here, so we've been looking here too.

Unless we find the right house for sale, we are pretty sure we are going to build.  We have outgrown (or would outgrow in another 2-3 years) starter homes.  We have also agreed we don't want to buy an older, bigger, house because of all of the problems that it could have.  So we are left looking at medium-ish sizes of new homes. 

Oh, how it sucks.  We know what we want for the most part.  If we buying a medium-ish size home we can grow into in the next 5-7 years we will probably stay there until all of our kids are out of the house.  Looking at our track record I could have another 5 kids in the next 7 years, as was so lovingly pointed out to me.  So we need a house with 4-5 bedrooms without the basement finished.

We know the builders we will most likely go with: Destination homes, Henry Walker, or McArthur.  Depending on the location these builders are reasonably priced. 

You know who isn't reasonably priced at all?  Symphony Homes.  They also aren't very nice.  We walked into a model and the woman looked at us and pretty much said "I doubt I can find anything in your price range or else all of our houses would be sold"....and what does that mean?  Young families can't afford your houses?  Or only older people have been buying from you lately?  Either way, I found it a little insulting. 

Moving on.

We also liked the guy with Lodder homes.  They are custom homes but very reasonably priced.  When we walked through the model the guy there could tell us exactly what was standard and how much it would cost for every upgrade.  Most people just say go to the design center and figure it out.  But they set up appointments for you to meet with the tile guy, and the carpet guy, and the counter top people to sit down and decide every little thing you want.  He said it can take over a year to build a home if you a slow about going to appointments or change your mind.  I like the idea of choosing everything that way, but I can't imagine spending all of that time with two rug rats in tow. 

So now we are left trying to decide when and where.  Everything feels right, until we see the next builder, or the next floor plan, and then we change our minds again.  Hopefully that means we'll be happy with anything....right?