After looking at hundreds of houses online, this is the first one I’ve really, truly liked. I won’t say “loved” because I haven’t seen it in person. It’s much too large — half the size or smaller would be preferred.

But still, it’s the one house I’ve looked at and said, “Yep, I could live here.”

As my partner observed, it’s the first house we’ve seen that actually looks designed and not just cobbled together from whatever parts happened to be lying around. We’ve looked at houses from $200,000 to $2 million and other than being larger, the very expensive ones are nearly always no better than the cheaper ones — just matchsticks poorly slapped together with no cohesive design sense at all. This one is the exception.

This is the kind of thing we are looking for and I’ve found a grand total of one in the entire country so far. Yay. And even it’s not suitable because it’s much too large, though otherwise perfect.