For the last little while Corina and I have been going through the process of looking for our first house. Our goal is to find a house by next spring, so we’ve been sorta getting the wheels in motion with regards to the whole process. We’ve been trying to gauge what our dollars will be able to afford us in our price range, so most Sunday afternoons for the last month and a half have involved cruising around Cambridge checking out open houses.

Today of all the days we’ve had so far was probably the most varied. There seemed to be lots of open houses today and we managed to hit up 5 different places in the areas we’re looking. The part I find amusing about open houses is how telling they can be about the people that live in them. The first place we hit up was in just immaculate condition. Almost too immaculate. It was practically like Roger from Sell This House had set the place up. I looked for hidden cameras and Tanya Memme, but to no avail. I find after watching shows like that it makes me extra skeptical of the house. Makes me think they’re trying to use furniture arrangement and clever paint application to make things look bigger then they are. The second house we went to was by the same agent as the previous house, and it too was pretty well staged, though not to the degree of the previous one. At least that one felt lived in.

We then checked a random for sale by owner house. We started touring the house only to discover after looking at a few things that it was the same layout as our friends place which was located a few streets over. This house was huge and owned by a nerdy single guy in his 40′s. I could tell he was nerdy given the 3 monitor computer setup, large closet full of computer components and a healthy amount of sci fi novels on his bookshelves. He did have a ridiculously large TV too. It had to be a 60″ set in the living room.

The next place we went to was very awkward and claustrophobic. The guy who lived there apparently loved model cars. Like I mean like more then a friend. In the basement he had to have had 100 boxes of various model cars that he had built, along with a little desk to assemble them at. Just weird things you would never find out about people without nosing through their house. I’m not judging though. You go into my office and there is a weird array of Oasis albums on vinyl, a complete set of He-Man figures from McDonalds, boxes full of cords for every electronic device you could imagine and a couple Star Wars posters.

The last house we went to was the weirdest and most likely to feature dead bodies hidden behind the walls. It was an elderly couple who had been put in a home, so the house pretty much had nothing but a few couches from the 70′s and the smell of old people and vinegar. I started laughing when we investigated the basement and found a second kitchen complete with chandelier that couldn’t have hung more then 4 and half feet from the ground. I snapped a picture of it. The weirdest thing about that place was the catacombs of storage they had down there, that I assume had shelves lined with pickled beets, jams, preserves and presumably was where the dead bodies were also stored at some point.

Since we’ve started this process, which I begrudgingly accepted to do I find I’ve started to enjoy our Sunday afternoon ritual. Corina is usually quite observant on most aspects of a house. Myself I find I always notice useless stuff like where people have their modem and wireless router setup. Most people seem to always have the same Bell modem, or at least the houses we saw today.