Over the past two weeks, we have been dealt two major blows in the search for our home.

First, my fiancee lost her job, and the market for her skill set isn't as wide and far-reaching as we had hoped.

Second, as a direct result of her job loss, we had to forget about the 1,300 square foot palace we made an offer on, because the mortgage payments combined with the ridiculous strata fees were too much for one breadwinner making a modest living to handle.

So, we started looking at smaller places, narrowing our search, but still looking predominately at concrete high-rise buildings in Surrey.

Our buying power has shrunk considerably with only one income coming in, but our hope is that soon we will have a second income to work with around the time we move in. A mortgage is just too much for only one income to handle.

In my last blog, I talked about the building we wanted to live in, and again, our realtor was able to find us two places in the same building.

The first was a 900 square foot, one bedroom, one bath unit on the fourth floor of the building. One of the major strikes against this otherwise lovely apartment was that the bathroom was painted the same shade of electric blue as my car. It's a good colour for cars, not so much for bathrooms, especially when the ceiling is also coated in blue.

Another of my pet peeves, when it comes to home-decor, was here too -- wallpaper, and lots of it -- there are few things that bothered me more than walls covered in hard to remove, ugly and loudly-coloured paper.

The second unit was the same size and had the same layout as the first, but it had a checkered history.

It had been in the possession of the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (otherwise referred to as the CMHC, and the guys who make sure your mortgage won't go into foreclosure) since 1999.

Yes, you read that right, 1999. And at that time, the original owners went into foreclosure and CMHC took ownership of the unit. Also at that time, they put it on the market for $79,000. Our realtor told us they couldn't give it away. It sat on the listings for a while before the building was declared a leaky condo.

Once all the repairs were finished, CMHC sat on the property for a while longer before listing it this spring for $199,000.

However, if you want a high-rise condo in Surrey today, $199,000 won't get you much, if anything suitable to support human habitation. So, we got about what we expected.

Upon first walking into the unit, there was a foul smell that I couldn't put my finger on. Even after I left, I still couldn't figure it out.

This is a place that really has to be seen to believe, nothing I can write will do it justice. True to form, the place looked as though it hadn't been touched -- much less, cleaned, since 1999, or earlier.

In the living area, there was a space cut out of the wall, and some wallpaper sporting a pattern that looked like something seen in the Sistine Chapel, only it wasn't a work of art, it looked awful.

There were four carefully painted rainbow walls in the bedroom that looked fresh out of the psychedelic era. I was waiting for Grace Slick or Donovan to pop out of the closet.

The kitchen was painted cheddar cheese orange with sword-shaped stencils across the walls, and for some reason, the mouldings were painted black.

Disappointed with our fruitless and disillusioned with our current financial picture, we decided to put our plans on hold.. again.