you smell that? yep, that's urine...

...february 21, 2010...
I met Jim for the first time on this Sunday.  I brought my mom with me for moral support, because Jim had warned me that some of the homes would be "trashed." Little did I know what the word would actually mean...

We met him in Cooper Commons and it was pouring down rain.  The first house we looked at was a home I dubbed La Costa (if you haven't caught on, I use the street names...much easier than saying 'the fourth house we saw...no before the one with the crack in the driveway').  La Costa was beautiful, and at the top of my price range... It would come to be my favorite home of the day.  We saw Waterview, a smoked filled home with holes in various doors that my mother--for some ungodly reason--loved; and we saw a two-story home that she also SWORE was the home we lived in when we first moved here, except it wasn't the same neighborhood or house at all.

We drove to more "central" Chandler, and during this car ride my mother took the opportunity to question Jim about whether he would throw in an extra garage door opener with purchase, if he was aware of current market value, and basically if he even knew what he was doing.  By the end of the drive, they were best friends and she had him cracking up with her comments the rest of the day.

In central Chandler, we found poopy diapers, a sleeping teenager, and Bob who didn't bother to clean his kitchen.  We went through a neighborhood where I refused to even get out of the car to go look at the house, and I'm pretty sure a drug deal went down while we were recalculating Jim's Garmin.  The final house was the true winner of the day...

Sheffield was in a gated neighborhood next to the community pool.  Jim tried to prepare us, but there was really no way to prepare someone for what we saw.  My mom immediately pointed out what looked like a blood splatter on the inside of the front window that could very easily have said "REDRUM" for all I know.  We opened the front door and I'll never forget what came out of Jim's mouth, "You smell that? Yep, that's urine!"  Between the smell, the dog food scattered about, the wedding dress and last month's bills...we had had enough for one day!