I feel your pain. We started looking last July with a view to being moved in and settled by November - hah! I got so tired of looking at houses. I looked on Trulia and Zillow and Google maps at every place we were interested in, and only contacted our realtor for a showing if all three passed our sniff tests, but even then, we'd get in and look at them and over and over, found something that made it seem it wouldn't work for us after all. I honestly despaired at times of finding just the right place, but in the first week of January we finally went to see a place we thought would work and long story short, we are now under contract and close in a couple of weeks.
But with the purchase came the decision about what to do about our current house. I'm so glad we didn't put it on the market first because if it had sold there would have been a lot more pressure to move and we probably would have ended up in one of those less-than-perfect places we looked at during all of those months. Now that we are under contract we *could* put the current house on the market, I suppose, but for all of the reasons you mentioned, I'm not that excited about the idea. Between dogs, cats and chickens, it would be tough to keep the house ready for showing, and from past experience, sometimes they don't give you a ton of notice that they want to show the house. So what we've decided to do is move, then spend a weekend doing a thorough clean, and then put it on the market. They can put a lockbox on the door and show it to their heart's content and it won't impact us at all.
As for the chickens. Well, when I was looking, one of the keyword searches I did regularly was "chicken" or "coop" (coop doesn't work so well because you get hits on anything that is a co-op and there are a surprising number of them). So for me, finding a place that already had a chicken coop would have been a major coup. But I realize I am in the minority. Unfortunately, so many people have misconceptions about chickens being carriers of disease, attracting rodents, and making a smelly mess, that it might work against you to have them right there when people visit. Is there any way possible you can wait until you've moved the chickens before starting with all that?
