House Hunting

So I know I have been absent for a long time and I am pretty sure no one is really checking here anymore but incase anyone is still stopping by I thought I would post a little bit about why I have not been around much. For over two months now we have been actively looking for a new house. It is time that we live in a house that doesn't share any walls with someone else and has at least a little yard. To say that this has been frustrating would be a total understatement. We now know more about how real estate works or doesn't than I ever thought possible. We put an offer on a short sale house 2 months ago and are still waiting on an answer. I will tell more about this whole process when we finally have an answer but for now I will say if you are thinking about buying a house and it is a short sale run in the other direction! It is so frustrating and the process just drags on and on. In the meantime we have continued to look at other houses. Nothing is on the market now and so when something does finally turn up 20 people descend upon in and get into an all out bidding war. It is awful. A couple of weeks ago we found another house that we liked that was bank owned. We submitted a very good offer over asking price and yet we weren't even countered and it went to someone else. All told it ended up with over 10 offers. Hopefully soon we will have found a house and had an accepted offer, but in the meantime I am spending a lot of time looking at houses and preparing to move. We had no idea this was going to be so hard, but we are slowly making it through this.