Ask Mecha: Housing Quandary I am all affixed to the horns of a large, very lengthy, snorting dilemma here. Help!→[More:]As we know, I got evicted - from a house I love, in a neighborhood I love, where I've lived for 6 years - in the beginning of the month. Since then I've been through all the various stages of grief and I also went and spoke with a mortgage broker & a real estate agent, figuring that they would probably tell me that my credit and my income were too abysmal for me to buy a house. Well. Turns out I was wrong about that and I do qualify to buy a house - if the house is under $115,000. Unfortunately, in Asheville right now and particularly in West Asheville, where I live and where I want to live, that is nothing at all.

Then, amazing, I found a house for sale that I liked. Not in West Asheville but actually in a very nice neighborhood a bit farther out of the city, in North Asheville which is usually fancy so finding a house in my price range there seemed miraculous. The house needs a lot of work - specifically, it needs a new roof pretty damn soon and a lot of other stuff but the other stuff is all stuff that my friends and I can kind of fix at leisure if I'm willing to live in a construction zone for a few months. Which I am and I've done that kind of work before.

But of course someone else had already put a contract in on it. So I put in the backup contract and then as I thought about the house more and more I thought, hmm, maybe not, it's so much farther away from my son's school and it's so far away from everywhere I usually go and all my friends' houses and everything and I love my neighborhood. But it didn't look like the primary contract was going to fall through right then anyway so I decided, since time is a wastin', to go look at rentals. The rental market here is tight as hell, it's hard to find anything and it's gotten way expensive. Particularly if you have 2 dogs.

Today I found a rental. It's not great - it's kind of crummy, actually, but not that bad, just a little small and low ceilings and paneling and yuck, carpet - but it's in my neighborhood, it has a great yard, the landlady is supercool and doesn't care what I do to or in the house, the dogs are fine and I can fence the yard and put in a garden or do whatever I want and it's slightly cheaper than the house I'm living in now. So I told her great, I'll take it, and she's supposed to be emailing me an application tonight which I think is just a formality; I think I have it if I want it.

Then I came back to work to a message from my real estate agent telling me that the primary contract on the house I was looking to buy was in the process of falling through and so I could in fact buy it. Except that I have to get an inspector in there to see if it will qualify for a CO, which is this weird Asheville thing whereby they won't turn the water on or let you live there if they think the house is substandard until repairs are made. I can't afford to live in one place and work on this house - I have to have the work done as I live there but I already have a roofer lined up who can do the roof in a weekend (it's an 800 sq. ft. house.) It's also possible that the mortgage people will get cold feet because the house needs work.

So, what do I do? I don't know whether to drop the contract on the house for sale and live in the rental house for a year or so while I look for other houses to buy in my neighborhood, knowing that chances of finding one are pretty much nil since it is the hot real estate neighborhood and the housing crash isn't going to hit Asheville any time soon, unfortunately. Or should I buy the house - assuming they'll let me - which isn't a sure thing anyway and thus let this rental, which is the first one I've seen that's even doable, slip through my fingers?

I can stall them all through the weekend, I think. Meanwhile, I asked the real estate guy to schedule an inspector post haste so we can see what the city is going to demand. But I'm still not sure that I want to leave my neighborhood, where my kid can walk to the store and has tons of friends and I have tons of friends and my local bars that are right down the street, for a neighborhood that kind of feels like it's way out in the woods (which is also nice, though and I genuinely like the house - 1925 wood bungalow) and where it's 2 miles to the nearest store and that's on a busy as hell street. Now, my kid needs to learn to drive soon anyway but, argh.

O Bunnies of the Magic 8 Ball, should I rent or buy or what? Hope me now!