The day I wrote this I was stuck on the tarmac at the Denver Airport with a 30 minute delay that I had no reason to expect would stop at just 30 minutes. To pass the time, I continued my series.

In the last episode, I introduced you to the House on the Hill (or the House on the River, as my husband thinks of it). That was the most dramatic house we saw, but there's a few others that are worth noting from the first time househunting.

The very first house we looked at was a 900 square foot little bungalow. They wanted about $90,000 for it. It had a little 8th of an acre yard, was on a very quiet street, quite close to where we did finally buy a house, and had a fireplace and interior brick walls on one side. It didn't have a kitchen or any appliances at all except a very old furnace but the most expensive thing it had was A Tree.

You might say, "Sarah, trees are valuable! They're beautiful and provide shade! Ideally a house would have lots of trees." You'd be right so far as it went. It was a lovely older neighborhood and the property had a few trees. The Tree, however, was a monstrous old elm tree that was in its final throes of life. The tree trunk itself blocked most of the view of the house. It was a small house, but it wasn't that small. We took one look at that tree and my husband said, "That's at least a $12,000 tree," referring to the cost to remove it. Around it, and very near, passed powerlines that went to the various homes in the neighborbood. So while it was in some ways a perfect little house, the tree itself was terrifying. These are the fun little things you learn about when you're looking for a house.

One house we went to see looked very promising on paper. It had an entire half an acre of yard, was in a... weird... location on the edge of town by the airport, and looked like a pink barn with white trim. It was large! It had over 1200 square feet, which was a mansion in our book, two floors AND a full (unfinished) basement. However, when we arrived, the window was broken in and the door swung on its hinges. Our real estate agent, at the time a young upstart in the local real estate market though now highly successful, took one look at it and said, "Yeah, there won't be any copper left in the house." And we left. Didn't even look inside.

A final favorite I'll share on this episode was the bunker house (also fondly referred to as the "shame chamber house"). This house was in a small town just barely separate from Des Moines. My husband was excited about not being "in the city" and it was a brick house, so I was optimistic. As houses went it was fine. It needed a significant amount of work and they wanted in the $100,000 range for it. It was on a corner lot, which means the lot was a little larger than usual but very exposed-feeling. And on the lot was a very round little hill.

When we walked around the yard before going inside, the agent said it was probably an old buried septic tank, something we could basically ignore, it was just a little annoying to mow. That was a little odd as this house was very much in the town, practically on the town square. It shouldn't have a buried septic tank.

Inside the basement, we noticed something odd. It was an old, grimey, unfinished basement built during the second World War. The concrete block walls followed the footprint of the house as we'd seen it upstairs, but at one end there was a door in the side of the foundation wall. Just a normal, hollow-core, house door. And beyond that door was a brick tunnel. The tunnel was perhaps 15-20 feet long, and at the end we could see a little light shining down on the floor.

At the end, we found ourselves in a strange brick chamber, a dome that seemed to not have any mortar holding it together. A little sunlight filtered through the bricks onto an old, upturned milk crate. The room was a little grungy, and had some playing cards scattered on the floor. It felt like an old gambling and drinking chamber from the prohibition days. Also it felt like it might fall in at any moment.

As you may have guessed, we did not buy that house. But we still talk about it.