House Hunting at Home Date Night

If you're a prankster, please steer clear of me today. I think we're all living through enough right now. We don't need practical jokes on top of it! ;) But happy April 1st to you!

I wanted to tell you about the at-home date Ryan and I enjoyed last weekend! In full disclosure, we are still enjoying this date, because we haven't finished it yet! But that's okay! It's been fun and different, and we certainly have plenty of time to keep moving forward with this one theme.

This is one I sort of dreamed up in my own based on a couple of staples in our lives. First, I love playing around on the realtor.com site. Ryan teases me because back in the days when we could drive around town and go places, I'd rattle off the listing prices of houses all over the place. I could tell you which ones were going to be snapped right up and which ones needed to drop their prices. And even though I can't drive by them right now, I still love looking at the site and seeing what's up for sale.

Secondly, we really love watching House Hunters on HGTV. (And all the spinoffs where people buy cabins and beachfront bargains and entire islands.) It's just fun to see what's out there in this great wide world.

So our date was an at-home House Hunters date, Shafferland style!

Because it was date night, I didn't cook - and we ordered pizza. (It was delicious.) For the record of our lives that this blog is, I will add that throughout this time of quarantine, we're still pretty much eating like we used to. I'm cooking almost all our meals, but we try to get carryout once a week to give me a break and to support businesses.

Here's how I set it up. The afternoon of our date day, I posed a question to Facebook, asking friends to give me a place they love (or would love) to vacation - and a number between 100 and a million. We plugged in those cities and rounded off the numbers to usable prices and saw what we could get for the money!

For the record, I had fifty-four responses to that request, which is why we still have the last few to go! 

And because I wanted the date to count for something beyond our fun weekend, we stopped after we looked up every suggestion and prayed for the person who made that suggestion. So if you played along - you've been prayed for! 

Here were some of our grandest finds:

(Atlantic City)

(Branson)

(Gatlinburg)

(Leavenworth)

(Topsail Island)

And then of course, there were a few interesting ones, too. 

(Branson)

(Mackinaw)

(Nags Head)

(Savannah. And my personal favorite.) 

We will finish the last few this week, but we've had fun looking at the best (and some of the strangest) properties around the country!

When you can't travel, you dream, right?