When looking for a house, it's useful to sit down and make a list of your must-haves and nice-to-haves and talk about the neighborhoods and schools and price ranges . But it's not until you start going to open houses that you actually begin to figure out what it is you REALLY like and what you absolutely cannot stand. At least, that's what we are learning in our house hunting process. We connected with a realtor at the end of September and quickly came to the realization (which I was mostly trying to be in denial about) that our $300,000 target price would not get us much in the neighborhoods where we've been looking to buy. So we cautiously expanded our price range to $350K, which was like a drop in the bucket in this real estate market, but at least some houses now appeared on our radar (though not many, and not very appealing ones, I assure you). After upping our budget, we decided to start checking out open houses to see what we could actually buy for that mo