We had an appointment to go look at four more houses on Friday.

Most of them were pretty quickly decided that they weren’t right for us. The one with the floors that weren’t even level, and with no finish work done; that one was an easy no.

The 70’s style decor of another one was hard to look past. Once we managed though, it was apparent that the bones of the place wouldn’t suit us. Too bad, as the yard was full of an old orchard and nicely cool, and it had a swimming pool that looked to be in great shape.

Another 70’s style house had a great new horse barn. I’d been watching this one from the street for a couple of years, but the interior was so dark and cave-like that it wouldn’t have done for us either, not without major renovations. We’re not prepared to dive into major remodeling.

The third one we saw though, was another story.

It has a smallish house, which was the original homestead site of one of the local farms, the rest of which had been subdivided up several years ago. It has a great old milking barn, with concrete floors and good stout beams. Next to that is the former milk shed, which is nice and cool and houses an air compressor for the lines that are run all over the property. It has a fifth-wheel carport, with hookups.

There is the original water tower building, even though the water tank itself has been removed. The bones of that building, now a three-story sort of hobby space, were also in very good shape for its age.

Next to that is another equipment shed, this one with tall doors for big equipment, more concrete floors, and 220v power. Near it is the original root cellar to the main house, which had been taken down several years before. We went down into it, and it was a good thirty degrees cooler than the heat of the day, and not at all dark and spidery, as I remember cellars from my childhood.

Off in a corner of the place is an orchard of mature fruit trees: several varieties of necatarine and peach, a couple of apples, some citrus, an apricot, some pistacio and a pecan, two pomegranates, a grape arbor, and others that I’ve forgotten.

The owners showed us this place themselves, which is somewhat unusual. At every stop on the outbuildings tour, either Junior or I would widen our grin a little. The man had the milk barn set up as a wood shop, and Junior is a woodworker too. The whole place is decorated with old farm equipment, some of it horse-drawn, and I’ve always loved that stuff. The woman said that they don’t use chemicals on their fruit trees, which is in accordance with how I was raised too.

They told us a lot about the history of the place. I love local history, and I think it would be the neatest thing to live somewhere oozing with it like that. The kids would have a ball there; did I mention the little clubhouse for their grandson?

But there’s always a but.

The house itself is small. A tiny kitchen. A small living room. Three bedrooms, and none of them are very big. And even though we don’t have the kids all the time, there are six of us to account for. We just didn’t see how we could shoehorn six people into that very small house.

And all of those beautiful, well-maintained outbuildings would require an awful lot of maintenance to keep them in that condition. It takes a lot of work to keep dirt and gravel roads free of weeds and holes, and to keep an orchard and garden up. It would take a huge effort to do something with all of that fruit the place would produce each year.

While all of those things are something that we would have liked to do, now is not the time for us to be committed to doing them. We both work too hard and have too little free time to take care of a place like that, and we recognized our limitations. Now, if the price was low enough that we could live in the house temporarily while we built another larger one on the lot, that might be feasible, but we think that’s fairly unlikely.

So we’re going to say no to this one, even though it drew me in emotionally. It’s us, it’s just not the right time, and I’m going to feel a little sad that it wasn’t every time I drive by it. It was a hard decision to make, but this is business and we have to be clear-headed about it.

So, onward to the next batch, possibly next week.