productive weekend.

yesterday, we drove around norristown and pottstown, looking at neighborhoods. then, we met with a realtor (soon to be officially *our* realtor), who was wonderful and helpful and not full of shit. she typed in our parameters and gave us a stack of 82 properties to wade through. after spending last night weeding out obvious undesirables (tenant-occupied and "as-is" properties, houses in known icky areas of town), we ended up with about 10 in Norristown and 12 in Pottstown that we wanted to take a cloer look at. This morning we got up and drove to N-town & P-town for the second day in a row, this time with specific addresses in mind. We pulled up as close as each house as we could get, discussed what we could see of the neighborhood and property, and made notes or eliminated each house. We're down to 5 in N-town and 10 in P-town.

We were both pleasantly surprised at our options. It seems that we can indeed live in a decent house in a decent part of either town within our price range. Yay! Next step for me is to schedule time with the realtor to go see them; next step for Mer is to start the pre-approval process for the mortgage.

On a side note, we're both rather irked by the notion that, in buying a house - possibly a semi-suburban one at that - we are truly turning into grown-ups. Ick.

In case anyone is interested, here are brief details of what we're looking at, in no particular order:
( I cut because I care )

All in all, we're leaning more towards Norristown than Pottstown, because of the neighborhoods and where our jobs are. But, you just never know.