House Hunting = Little House of Horrors

Oh. My. God. We're house hunting. We tried to give it a go on our own and realized we work best under pressure and because we're not under pressure to buy a house, we're not really giving it our all so we enlisted the help of a realtor who also happens to be dad's second cousin. I'm pretty sure I've viewed every available house in the area online and what I haven't found, she's doing a great job of digging up.

Here's the problem. I have one thought that rolls through my mind every time I click through the pictures of another house, "Oh. My. God. What were these people thinking?!" What were they thinking when they chose those decorations? What were they thinking when they took those pictures. I've carried over my dating-website philosophy to house-hunting: you're only going to post the best pictures you have to paint yourself (or your house) in a positive light so what you see in the picture, is the best it'll ever be.

Here's what I've come across:

• Wood paneled walls...sometime in the last 30 years it didn't occur to you that wood paneled walls are not ok?
• A cornucopia of flooring options...different carpet, different tile, wood, a little of this and a little of that all in the same lovely house
• A neon green pool...really? you didn't think to maybe dump a little algaecide or chlorine into the pool before you took the picture? 
• Odd paint jobs...yes, I know paint is the easiest thing to fix, that's not the point, the point is, why do people do the things they do? One house blinded me with the pictures as the rooms changed from neon yellow to bright red to sea-foam-green and a mural of a tree from an illustrated children's book on the wall behind the TV
• Clutter...doesn't anyone watch the 200 TV's they have scattered around the house? turn on HGTV and pick up a few tips. I don't need to see your sprawling basket collection. I don't care to see your tchotchke's scattered about. Box it all up and get rid of it, better yet, throw it all away! It's crap!
• Matchy-Matchy...it's probably unnecessary to use your leftover kitchen floor tiles for a counter-top. Parquet floors aren't my favorite but using 2-tones of parquet flooring to create a design is going too far. Aqua blue kitchen cabinets with a perfectly matching aqua wall oven can't possibly be safe because you know that oven was once used by the Alice and the Brady Bunch.
• Floral patterns...whether it's wallpaper or furniture or accent pieces, it's time for those to go bye bye

Of course we're rational enough to not of these really effect our final decision on a house but they really force me to question the sanity of a lot of people...