When to move?

This is what's been on my mind in the past few days.

We were looking at houses, and we did find one we really liked, but the weekend we put an offer on it, someone else did too, and we didn't get the house. We have a pretty low budget ($100K) and there aren't too many houses that we could get. Okay, scratch that - there are a lot of houses, but a TON of them are short sales. I mean, out of 54 houses, 50 of them are short sales.

Another factor is that the houses in the "city" - and I say it like that because it's not like NYC or another huge city, but it is a city - have really expensive taxes. Like, $3,500+ in taxes each year, and we can't pay that on top of a $700/month mortgage. We're getting frustrated, really frustrated. So this leads us to ponder the idea of moving back to Pennsylvania earlier than anticipated.

I'm not sure if I've explained this at all, so I'll explain it now:

Mr. Skinny's grandparents, at one point, owned about 20 acres of land in rural Northeastern Pennsylvania (NEPA). They bought it with the purpose of giving to their kids and grandkids to build on. My in-laws and Mr. Skinny's aunt and her family both have their houses on the land, which was given to them. Now Mr. Skinny's cousin has his land, and we're next in line for getting the land. Mr. Skinny has the land all organized, and we actually started clearing the land last spring, as well as getting it "perked" for a septic tank at some point in the next few years. We've always known that we want to move back there, heck, I've known that was a requirement since I started dating Mr. Skinny wayyy back in 2004. Ideally, I wanted to stay in Maryland until we had babies, since NEPA doesn't really have a ton of jobs in the history profession. But with everything that happened with Pop Pop, we feel like God is calling us to move back to NEPA sooner rather than later.

The 3 1/2 hour, 200 mile drive home at least once a month, if not twice a month is really getting to us. We can't stand our apartment, we have to walk up 39 steps before we walk through our back door, which doesn't have a lock, only a dead bolt lock (seriously, who does that?), wasps like to chill on our back porch light every summer, which is where the washer and dryer are (it's a back room more than a back porch), and the porch is slanted, you feel like you're walking down a hill, or like the back of the building is going to fall off. It's not insulated and when it's really windy, the attic door doesn't stay shut and it makes it seem haunted.

I love the area, I truly do, and I wish that we could move our families down to Maryland and we'd stay here forever. Mr. Skinny has a really good job down here, and I'd have a better chance to get a job in my field down here, but then why isn't the house aspect working out for us? Are we really meant to stay in our apartment for another year until we move back?

We're not on a strict timeline - since both of our parents are in NEPA, we can move back in with one of them until we find an apartment or buy a house, or whatever we decide to do. We do need jobs though, preferably for both of us, and not paying rent would help us a lot, even for a few months to just get us back on our feet. We're having a little financial trouble right now because I'm working part time and Mr. Skinny has had a few extra rain days in March, when we never really caught up from taking about a week off when Pop Pop was going downhill, and for his funeral and such.

So we're stuck. We know we're going to move to NEPA eventually, and probably sooner than later, but what do we do about a house? Find a new apartment? Hold out for a house? Move back to NEPA this summer, or as soon as we find jobs? Only God knows the answers, and we really need to turn to him for guidance and direction.