Looking for a house is hard work

We have been going out almost every day with Sue, our realtor.  We have looked at lots of houses.  Some are way out of the city, almost in Blanco, and others are in town.  When we first started looking, we looked exclusively on the northwest side of town - the area we used to live in.  Then we branched out a little, looking past 1604, then we started including the north central area and eventually started looking way out in Schertz and Cibolo.
Almost every house we looked at, we were so excited when we pulled up in the car in front of the house.  We would think, this one looks very promising.  Then, almost immediately things would start going wrong.  We'd see big cracks in the driveway, or we'd see cracks in the brick walls, or the roof would look bad.  If we got past all of that, sometimes we were even able to get past the living room  and kitchen but then there would be other things.  Sometimes it was the bathrooms that were obviously not well taken care of, or maybe it was that the layout of the house was all wrong.  Some living rooms were almost impossible to visualize being able to put furniture in them in any comfortable way.  Sometimes the master bathroom was right off the kitchen.  Or if there really wasn't too much wrong inside the house and with the walls and roof, then there'd be this HUGE oak tree branch right over the roof that looked deadly.
What we did find along the way was that higher priced didn't necessarily mean better home.  We saw plenty of homes that were less expensive than others that actually were much better deals.

We eventually learned that we needed to stay away from the Schertz/Cibolo area because most of the homes in that area have foundation problems because of clay soil.  But before we knew that, we looked at several homes in that area that we REALLY liked.  As we were visiting the homes we started realizing that a lot of them had had their foundations repaired.  Then later we read in the paper about many homeowners in that area trying to get their builders to buy their homes back because of ruined foundations.  So scratch that.

Then we found a home off of 281 and Evans road we were SO excited about because it had a WONDERFUL back yard.  It was kind of like our back yard on El Verde only on a much smaller scale.  It had lots of space, already had a lot of nice plants and trees, it had a gazebo and a nice shed and a really nice covered patio.  The house itself was nice, too BUT - the driveway was very short and was very sloped.  We even brought our car one time so that we could see if the front or back would scrape as we pulled into the garage.  (It didn't but there were just inches to spare.)  Then there was no dryer connection, there seemed to be a problem with the ceiling in the living room and master bedroom, there was a question about a section of the foundation, and the living room itself was so weird that we couldn't figure out how we'd ever place furniture in there.

We also visited a house way out 281 that was off of FM 306.  This home was closer to Blanco, Texas than it was to San Antonio.  It was on an acre and a half and had great curb appeal and a wonderful front porch.  The house itself was not that great - it's on a septic system, the bedrooms, closets and bathrooms were small, the living room was isolated from the kitchen and dining room, the kitchen was very plain and didn't have good counters.  The yard out back wasn't very big (the septic field took up part of the yard) but it was big enough to have a garden and be able to plant trees and stuff.  The best part of this house was the area behind the house.  There were steps that led down to a seasonal creek and it looked like the property went quite a ways there in the woods.  There was a great view from the house of the distant hill country.  That would have been so nice to have lived out there in the country for a while.  But being so far out, with no grocery stores or anything close by, the house not being that great (the house had already been on the market for 198 days) - all of those things made us (me) think that maybe it wouldn't be the best place.