Buckle up, kids, we are going house hunting, but not for the biggest McMansion in Texas or the beachfront property in Málaga. We have a budget and we mean it.

It has been incredibly hard to write lately. Life has been weird in many ways, not the least of which was that I have started a new job.

Oddly, as a 36-year-old woman and mother of 4, I have never held a permanent, full-time job before. I've had temporary 9-5 office jobs, I've done shift work, freelance work, contract work, but never had a salaried full-time job. After 12 years of being a mostly-stay-at-home-mom, I am wondering how working moms exist. But those thoughts are... A LOT. And I'm still processing this dramatic change to my life, so writing about it now would be premature.

Instead I'm going to tell stories about the insane houses my husband and I have looked at in our house-hunting days. See, we have only looked for houses with rock-bottom prices and ambitious repair needs, and that means we have seen some really... special... houses.

We first started looking for houses in December of 2012. The housing market was depressed and we had a blank check from my husband's family bank to buy any house we wanted. Unfortunately, we didn't have a lot of money, I had just quit a really crummy job, and we had to have a monthly payment less than $600. Nowadays that number is shockingly, laughably, unthinkably small, but 2012 was a different time.

Not that it wasn't a really small number then too. We knew we were looking at houses that needed work, especially since our down payment was going to be nearly non-existent.

Oh yeah, the blank check from the bank. My husband grew up in a small, small town in Iowa with a population of 204 people. His mother was from there and her parents were from there and THEIR parents were from there and... long story short, the family and the bank were so intertwined, they didn't care what the family did because they knew it would be covered. There are perks to this incredible small-town loyalty.

But again, we needed to not have huge monthly payments because we didn't have huge monthly income. So we looked at houses that could generously be called "fixer-uppers". The upper end of our budget was $90,000 (we looked at a couple houses as expensive as $110,000 😱). Some of them were not too bad, many of them were nice houses till you went into the basement and saw the huge crack in the foundation. But some of these houses were BONKERs.

The most extreme example of these I will call the House on a Hill. As soon as we drove up to it, we knew it was special. Even saying that we "drove up to it" is a little deceptive, as it had no driveway or sidewalk and was set off a dirt road in a small town. We call it the house on a hill because the entire town was built on this sloping hill and this house was just set on top of it. As in the entire house was built like normal and set on the slope, with floors parallel to the hill and the walls going up perpendicular to that slope. We walked in at the bottom corner of the house and uphill through the living room. The front door didn't close because it just really, really didn't want to. This also meant that the stairs to the second floor were unusually steep. We didn't take them.

But this is somehow not the weirdest part of the house. No, that was the fact that the basement had no floor.

Not a packed earth floor. There are houses in Iowa built on a packed-dirt basement. They give me the ick and I'd never buy one, but that's a thing. The earth is dry and bare and everything Tolkien promised a Hobbit hole was not. But there is a floor you can walk on. This house lacked even that.

Instead there was a river. Water, murkey and flowing, covered any floor that might have existed. A path of pallets had been set in the water to allow you to walk through the river to the furnace. Which was also on pallets. My husband was too amused not to go see the furnace, but I had already noped out. I didn't know what was in that water; I was sure it was either the trash compactor eel from Star Wars: A New Hope, or Grendel's mother, and I wasn't eager to meet either.

The icing on the cake was that this house was situated next to what appeared for all intents and purposes to be an authentic New York City tenement house, a wide, many-storied brick building with numerous fire escapes extending from the top floor down to the bottom. Natalie Wood could have lip-synced "Tonight" on that building and it would have been totally convincing.

Somehow I don't think the Jets would have met in the floorless basement of the house next door though.