The Life of Bryan and Sarah: Help Bryan and Sarah Find a Home!

Yes, that's right ladies and gentlemen, step right up and have a hand in the fate of the life of Bryan and Sarah!

We have decided to take the next step and go from rental rip-off to owning our own fixer-upper. Well, we will still be in an apartment for the time being. We can't be homeless while we house hunt, now can we? As we speak (or as I write, that its), we are planning our first of two BIG moves. We are moving from our current apartment in the O.C. to an apartment somewhere in the vast expanse known as... Corona.

Hopefully this will help give us a feel for the area, a lay of the land, a glimpse into the lives of Corona-ians... or something like that. So, today (Sept. 9, 08) we spent the first part of the morning looking at apartments with a suprising bit of luck! We have narrowed it down to our top three and tomorrow we are going back to look at three more before making our final decision. We found that Corona has some very affordable apartments that outshine the apartment that we are currently packing into boxes. Compared to our one bedroom apartment that has recently skyrocketed in price, Corona apartments offer two bedroom apartments for the same price or a little higher and they come with washer and dryer hook-ups! We were stunned to see nicely redecorated apartment with better features for a little more than waht we are currently paying. Oh the price of living in the tendy O.C.! So, tomorrow we are off to seal our fate and choose an apartment that will temprarily house our boxes that will eventually be transfered into a (drumroll please) ... HOME!

Then, it was on to house hunting! Nine houses later, we had a lot of opinions about these houses, overwhelmed brains, lots of notes and a dead camera battery.

House #1: Let's just say we ran scraming from this abandoned, dilapadated house with a broken window. We didn't even get a picture of it to prove our story. The person who listed this house ia a wiz at Photoshop...the online images that the realator brought looked nothing like the scary reality before us. So, it was a "NO WAY" to the sad house on Call Way.

House #2: Our first thought driving up to this thought was, I don't feel very safe here. Little did we know that those "unsafe" feelings would later increase by the tenfold! For starters, the property had an iron gate and an iron gate = not a very nice neighborhood (to be blunt). The house is also being sold "As Is." Also, not a good sign. The house and well, the whole property was in need of an Extreeme TLC Makeover and a blind eye to it's imperfections. For instance, the pink-ish tile, that we believe must have fallen off of the back of a truck or been 90% off at the tile depot. Now, I'm all for a good deal, but pink-ish tile is a little much. Not only that, but they tiled as many surfaces as they could with that pink-ish tile monstrocity! The floors, the counters and it even made it onto the walls! Now, it might have been ok if they had done a good job, but the pink-ish tile with the rose colored grout was not done very... errr... very professionally.

See images below of pink-ish tiled kitchen, dining room area and one of the bathrooms!!! (Just to make a note, the living room is also covered in pink-ish tile.)

Help! Im being smothered by the pink-ish walls!

I guess I have to be fair and say that the home wasn't completly horrible, it did have 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and it did have a nice sized yard, a dead yard, but it was big. Other than that, it just needed new paint, new carpet, new counters, new cupboards, new doors, and that's probably just scratching the surface. Oh! One funny thing was that the slider door had to be flipped, because some genious put it in wrong, so that if you stepped out, you would fall, because the stairs were to the left of the opening...hahaha...that made me giggle.

And here we have: One of the smaller bedrooms, the fear of the purple walls and the Master bathroom, complete w/ a tiled shower!

So, house #2 was a no go.

House #3: Could it be? A house that doesn't make us want to throw the car in reverse and hightail it out of there? Oooohhh...we were intrigued! This little beauty was two stories and 1199 sq. ft. on a plot of land that you could sneeze on. So, what do you do with a matchbox plot of land? Build up of course!

Well, at least this home didn't make us want to shiver when we opened the front door and it was a move-in-able home... that's a plus. Sure it was a small property, but there sure isn't a lot of mowing that needs to be done on Saturday morning! The home did need some updating: new carpet, paint, cabinents and some other touches. But all in all it was nice, it had a fireplace, nicer tile (yes, I said nice and tile in the same sentance), a nice layout and some good storage places.

Here is the front door, living room/ fireplace/ diving room, the stairs and landing and the kitchen.

Next is more of the kitchen, the master bathroom with a small walk-in closet and bathroom, this time we have puple SPARKLY Walls and a purple 1/2 bath.