Zandra and I spent the end of last week in Connecticut (our soon-to-be-new-home) looking for a new home. I've forgotten how much I hate searching for a new home, and am now realizing how absolutely blessed we were to be able to actually build our current home. Alas, building a new home is not in the budget, nor in the timing for us this time, so it's house searching for something that suits our needs with flaws we think we can correct.

This week's search was primarily an area recon, so we saw lots of houses in lots of areas. After about 18 or so houses, I realized that in addition to rating the houses on suitability space/layout/location, I was beginning to classify houses by smell. Much like people get classified by Myers-Briggs personality types, I started dropping the houses into smell types. Here's what I came up with:

• "New House" Smell - The smell of new construction. Dust, dryness, wood, paint, new carpet, and probably a bunch of chemicals used in cleaning or construction.
• "I just replaced the carpet" Smell - The smell of someone who just replaced the carpet to make the house look nicer for sale. Smell of new carpet, chemical odor from gluing seams and manufacturing.
• "A cat owns this house" Smell - The smell where a cat owns the residence. Kitty litter (and, um, litter box contents), cat food and mustiness
• "A dog lives in the house" Smell - The smell where a dog lives in the residence. Amplified on days when it's raining, it's the smell of a happy dog who enjoys rolling around in the grass.
• "I've got something to hide" Smell - Probably what Martha Stewart's house smells like, except on steroids. Scented candles burning everywhere. Air fresheners galore. What smell are they trying to hide? Maybe the "cat owns this house" smell.
• "I don't clean well" Smell - Smell of cooking, trash, mustiness, and maybe dirty laundry. The smell of someone who only cleaned the house because someone was coming to see it.
• "Basement w/o a dehumidifier" Smell - The smell of a damp, but not wet basement. Usually holds true only to the basement of houses - normally when a basement is used for storage.
• "This house is making me hungry" Smell - Reserved for one house where the owner was home preparing for a dinner party he was catering. Owner was a professional chef. The smells were unbelievably good. I felt like penance should have been for us to stay until he was done cooking so we could sample. The kitchen of that house was fantastic. Too bad the bedrooms of the house were not.
• "I left the windows open to ventilate" Smell - The smell of the outdoors. People who like to leave their windows open. Very nice.
• "There's something weird but I can't put my nose on it" Smell - Reserved for one house where I think I spent more brain cycles trying to determine the smell than on the house itself. I think I eventually came to the conclusion that it was a mix of "A cat owns this house" and "A dog lives in the house" and "I don't clean well" smell....
• "There's no smell in this house whatsoever" Smell - The smell of, well, nothing distinctive. I think this means a clean, well-kept house that was fairly new.

I wish we were done house hunting. I don't know how my friends in the military do it every few years. It would drive me up a wall. I think I'm doing this classification thing because I'm trying to keep my sanity intact.

The fact that we also can't seriously put an offer down on a new house until we sell the old one doesn't help the job either....