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I'm a twenty-nine year old Army wife currently living near a large Army post. I have an unhealthy obsession with Dr. Pepper, the Internet, cloth diapers, and ridiculous TV shows. I'm a stay at home mom to two beautiful daughters, AJ and Amelia. We also have a 6 year old beagle named Abby who is as dumb as a box of rocks.
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Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Housing Woes...

So a while back I blogged about how we were planning to buy a house at our next duty station. We had decided that we were ready and since we kind of know that we're going to be stationed there on and off for the rest of D's career it seemed like a good time!

Well, then we got to thinking about it and since D is going to be TDY en route for 2-ish months during the PCS we decided to wait. We were planning to live on post for a year and then buy a house. We have orders so we started the application process for living on-post in hopes that we'd be able to get on the wait list sooner.

When we checked online, the wait list said 6-12 months depending on which neighborhood we were interested. Typically the list that is posted online is kind of embellished so that they cover their butts and don't tell you its going to be a 3 month wait and then you end up homeless for 6 months. When I called the housing office yesterday to ask a question the receptionist informed me that the wait is indeed 6-12 months. For realz. Ugh.

That means that if we want to live on post we're going to be in lodging a hotel for the entire wait. We can't stay in lodging on post because we have a dog and most of the on-post lodging does not allow pets. Double ugh.

Needless to say, our plans have changed again and we're now looking at both homes for rent and homes for sale in the area of our next duty station. To say I'm getting stressed out would be an understatement. For some reason I'm having a really hard time finding quality home rentals in our price range. I've gotten some advice on neighborhoods to look at, but I can't find any homes in those areas that are for rent within our BAH.

What's a girl to do? How do you find housing when you PCS? Do you move and then look or do you have an idea of where you'll live before you leave your current duty station?

Also, totally unrelated!! Grab my button from the right hand side.... ---->
Thanks to Erin from Moore To Love for helping me out again!

5 comments:

  1. we were in this exact same situation when we pcsed here... it was so bad and there wasn't even anywhere to rent. my one suggestion to you is cross your t's and dot your i's if you buy a house. we were so rushed we didn't really have time to do the looking we were needing to do and while our house is nice, there was a lot wrong with it that we kinda got duped into being responsible for because of our desperate situation! Keep us posted and I hope things go very smoothly for you!

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  2. We rented our house that we live in now sight unseen except for internet photos. BAD. IDEA.
    We got here and all the carpet smelled like cat urine, there was a window in the upstairs bathroom literally falling out, and so on.
    My advice would be to find someone, ANYONE, in our lovely army community to go look for you at houses you find online and are considering. Someone who knows someone, a fellow military spouse who has a friend stationed there etc. Find a real person to go look at it and give you a REAL description of the home. And like the above commentor said, don't panic, or at least don't let on that you are, because these realtors I swear can smell your fear, lol.

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  3. Ugh. That sounds so stressful. Good luck finding something. I wouldn't want to live in the lodging for that long either. Blah!

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  4. have you looked at AHRN.com? That's the best website out there for finding a house for rent. As for buying? I'd find out what realtors are out there and call/email them for listings. Good luck! (and I would find out how the wait list works where you're going. We found out when we got here that we were put on the list based on when we had left our last duty station. Since the hubs had done Ranger school in between we had a lot of time since we left our last station and we were put at #2 on the list. So what we were told would be a 60 day wait turned out to be a 17 day wait...since you said your husband is going TDY en route, I would look into this!)

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  5. Have you tried the Army Housing Referral Network? I think it's something like ahrn.com That's how we tend to find places when we are moving. It's military approved and they tend to work with your schedule.

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I'd love to know what you think...