Buying a house is like a game of poker. There is bluffing. There is holding your cards to your chest and revealing only what you need to. There is guessing at your opponent’s motives. There is the decision of how much money to put down.

It brings out the calculating part of my nature, which also makes me uncomfortable. It feels cold to look at a house specifically because I know the owner is going into foreclosure or because someone died. I’m just looking for a good deal, but I’m also looking to benefit from someone else’s misery.

After all, with houses, you’re dealing with people’s lives, not just their finances. Because of this, you can learn so much about a total stranger. After looking at a house yesterday, I knew that the owner:

• Was a single mother of a little girl
• Had paid way too much for the house and was going into foreclosure
• Was a “born again Pagan,” whatever that means
• Had a dance studio in her backyard
• Was watching us from the neighbor’s house with a scowl on her face

So, I deduced, she is a single mom/arty/new age-y type who got in way over her head financially and was losing her house, leaving her and her daughter without a home of their own. This left me feeling sorry for her, and less inclined to buy the house. It was too small anyway.

Another thing you have to weigh when house shopping is the cold realities of money–will this house appreciate in value? is this a good investment?–against all the intangibles: how much do I love the house, how it will impact our lives to move into it, can we grow into it, etc.

The second house we saw yesterday was twice the size of the single mom’s house. It was in an affluent neighborhood and selling for half the price of the houses around it. You could see a view of the hills from the backyard. It was being sold by the bank, which means we could probably get it for less than the selling price.

But the family was inside, and they had:

• At least 15 cats running around
• Laundry piled so high you couldn’t walk in the hallway
• A filthy, filthy kitchen
• A child in the driveway digging at cement with a serrated knife
• Ants
• Overflowing trashcans and things that passed for trashcans
• Five or six cars parked in the yard, including one on the lawn
• A room that smelled so strongly of urine, they kept the door shut so they wouldn’t have to smell it

Here’s a house so trashed, its condition is very hard to tell. It could need to be gutted. Then again, it could just need a good cleaning and a new floor in the urine room. However, assuming no major repairs are needed, just cleaning it out would cause the house to appreciate significantly. Re-sale, once it had been fixed up, could be $200,000-$250,000 more. On top of that, the house is plenty big and we could live in it 10 years, no problem. It would be a good investment, if we were willing to take the project on.

But who wants to deal with a house like that? The stress of cleaning it and fixing it, on top of it being our first house and having a mortgage for the first time, seems like too much. The intangibles don’t make it worth it.

After looking at that house, we saw a third one, which I can only describe as a mini-mansion. It is absolutely gorgeous, and just slightly out of our reach, financially speaking. Looking at it, I was struck at how widely the three houses varied, even though there is only a $35,000 difference in their price range.

And yet… not one of them is right for us.