Karen and I were a young married couple. We were in love and ambitious. I should correct that. She was ambitious and her ambition sort of spread to me as well. She was also very frugal, which I admired and respected. We had just moved to Knoxville for me to attend grad school. I figured that since I would be there for 5 years or so, it would be financially wise to purchase a house for us to live in rather than pay rent for that long. So we stayed in on-campus housing while we went house shopping. We looked at several houses. Karen was really excited when we first started looking because there were houses in the $20k range. Our realtor was adventurous enough to take us to one such house, and relieved when we decided we didn't want a house in that poor of condition. (There were large holes in the floor, all the copper had been stripped, the house smelled strongly of urine, etc.) We shopped around a lot, and possibly would...
Life is what you make of it.