Where is HGTV when you need them?

We are house hunting. We have been house hunting for the last few months. We are house hunting and it is not cute and fun like the HGTV House Hunters show. We did not look at 3 good viable options and pick what was best. We looked at a good solid 20+ in person and went through a good 300+ online. We found TWO viable options. Two. We put offers on both of them. Stress.

Let me tell you about Virginia Beach/Hampton Roads. It is a military area. There are 1.5 million people crammed into a small area. Most were/are military. This area exploded in the 80's and was not planned well. So houses are thrown up next to each other and have not been changed since the 80's. Housing is ridiculously expensive for what you get. Ridiculous. You need to start in at least the high 200's for a decent house/neighborhood. Otherwise you go farther out for decent neighborhood and houses. The town homes around here are so horrible you can barely stand to look at the outside. I seriously get panicky when we drive through some of them. Imagine 4-6 member families, all their vehicles and toys and bikes living in the ugliest town homes you have ever seen crammed next to 60 other homes on a block. That is typical Va Beach living.

So, looking for an adequate home has not been fun. Most of the homes in our price range are short sales. Short sales are notorious for taking months and months and sometimes falling through. The bank has more short sales than they know what to do with and if the seller's agent is not aggressive than they will fall through. That's happened with us. We found a home we liked and felt good about and put in an offer. Nothing happened. The agent would not call our realtor back. A bank proprietor was not assigned. We kept looking in the mean time. Our closing date was today. We still have not heard from the house and our contract is now void. I really thought it was our house.

We found a second house that was two blocks from the first. It is actually perfect for us. It fits our needs and we would only need to paint it. It is at the very top of our price range, but is a regular sale, which means we could close and qualify the $6,000 tax credit. Plus we can move before I am too enormous and fat to do anything.

Some one put an offer on it an hour before they were to look at our contract. We had to re negotiate and pray our offer was better than the other offer. Stress.

Where is HGTV when we need them? Why are we not sitting at a cute cafe, sipping lattes and waiting for the " You got the house!" phone call. I am pretty sure no one is going to decorate a whole room for us either. I think I would rather be in a t.v show than to be in real life.

Maybe we will have a cute little house with a huge backyard. Maybe will be stay in our little condo and cram another little baby into it. Maybe HGTV will come to my rescue.