Sold: Part Two

Sorry for the delay in follow-up. We closed on our house five days after having returned from Kentucky, where Molly and I had been for three weeks. After closing, I had a week to pack our entire apartment (because I hadn't even considered packing before then), not to mention catch up on the work that I had sorely neglected while I was out of town. Then we moved and, despite having called our cable/phone/internet provider three weeks in advance, it took them another week after we moved (so four weeks since I first called) to hook our service up. This is particularly troublesome since I am in the middle of teaching two online classes. So I have spent large portions of the past week at Starbucks getting my work done during the day and trying to unpack at night. Which is why that it is just now, two weeks after the first post, that I am getting around to the continuation.

[Part One Here]

 In hindsight, our home search wasn't that long. We started looking at the end of April and entered into escrow on the house we chose in June. Not too shabby. But it felt excruciatingly long during the process.

Our price range put us at the top of the fixer-upper, needs updating range and at the lower end of the lovely, already re-done family-home range, or at least that's true because we were very picky about the part of town we would look. Tallahassee, though really not that big of a city, has real estate spread all over every inch of it. We could have gotten a much bigger and/or more affordable house had we been willing to move to the north side of town (where there are lots of new developments), but then our drive to work and Molly's daycare would have probably been at least 45 minutes one-way. That's fine for some people, but after five years of living in-town, we weren't ready to leave it.

So we saw a lot of duds. We only looked at a couple of shortsales because they were both in such bad shape. They would be these beautiful homes that would be perfect, but because the previous owners had taken such poor care of them they were not at all a possibility for us.

About two weeks into looking, we actually found two houses that we loved. The first one was an absolutely gorgeous 1940's bungalow with yellow siding (for some reason I am most drawn to yellow houses, so that was a major plus for me). The house had original hardwood flooring, gorgeous windows, built-in shelving, a nice-sized yard, and was walking distance to downtown. I loved it...except for the fact that the yard was bordered by a train track. Though the neighbor assured us that she never even noticed it anymore, it was less-than-ideal.

The second house was in a neighborhood that we loved (which our realtor referred to as the "local hippie neighborhood"). It was a 1970s ranch that had clearly been loved and taken care of. The kitchen had been totally redone and opened up to a spacious dining room. It had a den with a stacked stone fireplace, a huge backyard, and sat at the end of a dead end street bordered by a small creek. We both loved it and made what we thought was a generous offer.

The sellers came back and told us that they wanted every penny of their asking price with no concessions on their end (such as no help with closing costs) and they wanted us to close faster. Not only was I completely put off by how unreasonable their "counteroffer" was, their house simply wasn't worth what they were asking. So we passed on it.

[Note: the owners recently dropped their asking price $10k lower than our offer. I feel inappropriately triumphant about that. Bad form, I know, but I can't help it.]

I was surprisingly okay with losing that house (I tend to take these things quite hard), but I was starting to lose hope that we would find "the" house. I spent an excessive amount of time scouring the internet for houses, and I just didn't see anything that I thought I would compare to our first offer.

The following weekend our realtor showed us another ten houses. At the last minute, I asked her to show us another house that had just gone on the market. The house looked gorgeous in pictures, so I couldn't understand why the price was so low (or what seemed awfully low compared to other houses we'd seen). The nine other houses that we looked at that weekend were duds (some were lovely, but none were for us), but the last-minute house was amazing.

This house was a 1940's Colonial with a huge backyard (complete with sailboat-shaped sandbox!) It had four bedrooms and a bonus room, which had been used as a homeschooling classroom. The whole house was in immaculate condition and had clearly been lovingly cared for. The sellers even set out cookies for us when we came to view the house. (Tip to keep in mind for future home-selling. We loved it! Another house left fliers about the neighborhood; we loved that, too.)

There were, of course, two problems. The first was location. It wasn't really in a neighborhood, more of a collection of houses, and it bordered a very busy road. However, the yard had a large, privacy fence and we couldn't hear any of the traffic from inside the house.

The bigger problem was that the roof was old enough that we would have had to replace it before being able to get homeowner's insurance. We couldn't quite decide whether or not the house was worth it for us, so we decided to sit on it for a bit.

While thinking about it, our realtor encouraged me to take David back to see a house that she had shown me already. I wasn't a fan, but I couldn't really pinpoint why. There was nothing wrong with the house. In fact, it was in our dream neighborhood. But, though it was in fine shape, the previous owners hadn't really done anything to it. It needed new paint everywhere, the kitchen needed updating; it just felt old. But, in lieu of other options, we agreed to go see it.

For no reason at all, the idea of seeing that house again depressed me. I was terrified that Dave was going to love it and, without being able to find a decent reason against it, we would buy it. It would be fine, but I wouldn't be excited about it. It would just be a place to live, not a home.

[I should point out that David would never have bought a house that I didn't love, but I couldn't help fretting over it.]

To cheer myself up, I asked our realtor to also show us a house in the same neighborhood. I had been watching it for awhile and was excited to see that the price had just been dropped, though it was still on the upper tier of our price range.

Further proving how right for each other we were, Dave hated the first house. Like me, he couldn't pinpoint why, but he just didn't like it. It was a clear no-go.

But then we went two streets over to see the other house. And that's where we fell in love.