Looking for the right home seems a simple enough task when I think about it. You make a list of the criteria that you want in said home. Then you scour the internet for places that match your wants. If that wasn’t clear enough, allow me to list a number of these and mansplain them to you.

1. Size, because it always matters.
2. Location, because as a man there will come a time when I make a poor decision that results in physical injury. Do I want to travel 10 minutes or an hour to the hospital to have my finger reattached and will the ice melt on the way there?
3. Schools, see number 2.
4. Number of bedrooms, bathrooms, because if one or more individuals in the house has IBS, you are going to need that second one.
5. Land. While we are discussing acreage, why is it that some real estate websites choose not to provide the acreage on their listings. You are happy to tell me what year the house was built, how much the annual taxes cost, the dimensions of the individual rooms, but instead of giving me the amount of acres you tell me in square feet. This may come as a shock to you, but square footage of land means nothing to me. Google says one acre is equal to 43560 square feet. I did not come to your website to do long division math problems. Just give it to me in a normal way. 
   Sorry. That has been building up for a long time. And to be fair, acreage barely means anything to me. I have a very shallow grasp on how large an acre is. If you tell me one house has 5 acres and the other has 10, I can’t quite imagine what that is. However, I would guess that means one is almost twice as big as the other. 

6. Outbuildings. What a word. Someone in a marketing position definitely came up with that one. Could be a nice pole barn, could be a rickety shed full of wasps that isn’t safe to lean against. I wonder if an underground bomb shelter would count as an outbuilding since it’s not really “out”. More of an “in” building if you ask me. Oh, you didn’t ask. My bad.
7. Special Features. Maybe you want a pool, a fireplace, a ready-to-use dungeon, a moat, a landing strip, a helipad, a slaughterhouse, a greenhouse for growing cannabis, or whatever else floats your boat (like a lake). 

I had a friend who had a special wine cellar and by cellar I mean a room with tightly controlled humidity and temperature which probably cost over half of what my house did. To each his own as one is wont to say, but I prefer my wine straight from the store and into use and so a wine cellar seems like a wasted space for my interests. However, a house with a history of poltergeist activity would be intriguing.

All that to say, some people, some people close, some people close to me seem to be quite befuddled in regards to what they want in a house. When questioned directly, this person might flounder, might change their mind, might appear as if they have no idea what their own opinion is on the matter. Let me provide a couple of examples to illustrate my point.

No One: 

My Wife: Maybe we should buy one of those tiny houses.

(A few minutes Later)

Me: Here’s a house that was just listed. It’s in our budget and has 3 bedrooms.

My Wife: No, it has to have at least 4 bedrooms.

Me (to myself, very quietly): And how many bedrooms does the tiny house have?

——-

Me: What did you think of that house in town for sale?

My Wife: I don’t think I want to live in town. I would rather be out in the country where we could have some land and woods, let the kids run around.

Me: Uh huh.

Also My Wife (In her diary, late at night, cuddling her stuffed animal): I cannot abide the crippling fright and anxiety of being alone near the woods. I am too afraid to go camping in a tent. I jump at the rustling sounds in the leaves, the piercing animal calls. The trees must be full of killers watching us.

——-

I am not immune to confusion over what I want, but my dream house was predetermined many years ago. My school had a handful of female oracles who used an ancient fortune telling device to predict our futures. They carried a parchment that was folded and the word “PUSH” was emblazoned on the front. So I did as the word bid. And the rest is history. I got married, I had the two kids, now I am waiting on the log cabin and the Dodge Viper. 

On a side note, if my realtor comes across a 4 bedroom tiny log cabin for sale with ten acres of land (do the square footage math yourself), a fireplace, an outbuilding that can be converted into a dojo which will never come to fruition because it will be a craft space, and has whatever kind of trees repel serial killers please let me know.