I never thought trying to find a house to buy would be this tough.

The most recent place we found was a barn that had been partially converted for living. It needed a lot of work, but it was affordable. Joe reached out to the broker, the work it needed wasn't daunting, and we started talking about going upstate to see it. Then, in an aerial view, I saw a large installation of buildings a quarter-mile up the road. Streetview revealed nothing, so I started researching what the buildings might be. It turned out to be a 'bionics' laboratory, which means lots of testing on rats and mice. We're leaving NY to get away from the rats, not to live amongst nuclear ones that may have escaped. The barn went off our list.

I fell in love with a late 1800's Italianate with a giant porch. It's in the middle of a charming village in the Catskills, in a quiet town an artist I know lives in. I called her and we spoke for almost an hour about how great the area is, how brutal the winters, hows it's easy to get to NYC, about the theatre and creative community. At the end of our conversation she casually mentioned how "the downtown area floods every five years or so and it's still a mess from the last flood." Poof went the Italianate.

In the same town was an amazing old Federal style brick commercial building. It sits where the floods roar in.

It's not that we're not aware of flooding. Our house hunting trip to Catskill made us very aware of flooding and we now check everything against FEMA floodmaps to see what's in the flood zone. What we're finding, though, is water doesn't always go where it has in the past. Even though new maps are being drawn up, not everything that floods shows up as being in the flood zone. (During Hurricane Sandy, the water came exactly to where the New York City flood map showed it would. We watched the whitecaps wave across Hudson Street from our living room.)

Over the last few months we found a house that had a massive power station hidden just up the road, and another house that turned out to be near land that may become a giant wind farm. I started reading the notes from the town council meetings and discovered projects for a pipeline and an even bigger power station that are in the works, though these could take years. Friends who bought a house in a town I love said they can hear farm turbines and other machinery from half a mile away. When the wind blows a certain way they can even smell it. They don't mind, though, and rack it up to country living.

NYC is loud and ripe and lately all I can hear are sirens and horns. When I ask friends upstate about quiet they laugh and say nothing's as noisy as the quiet. But it's a great quiet: the birds wake them at 4:30 and when the volunteer fire dept. horn blares at noon it's a unifiying sound, not an intrusion. We're getting to the point where we have to do our due diligence and then hope for the best. But I'm cutting and running at rats. Especially bionic ones.