"Elise, I've been thinking. Do you think you could arrange for me to see that house before I leave town?"
And then, that five days later we'd be trying to get our ducks in a row to make an offer? Seriously. I just really didn't see this coming. Especially because I wrote way more about my feelings here than I ever discussed with Dan in person, because I really didn't feel there was much of a point. And no, he did not see that post before he made that fated phone call.
The real bugger is, we're trying to do all of this without selling our current house first. It's slightly complicated and a bit risky. But Dan isn't the king of saving money for nothing. Hopefully we'll still have some savings left when this is all said and done.
And did you notice the words "Dan" and "risky" were only about an inch apart in that previous paragraph? That's probably the closest Dan's been to risk in like 20 years. And I love him for it. I can trust that man more than I've ever trusted anyone. He is as solid as a stone wall. All lovely, and all reasons I never even thought to beg for this house. I never thought we would actually be at this point.
The fat lady definitely hasn't sung yet either though. I'm trying not to hype myself up too much in case they don't accept the offer or someone else beats us to it. Time will tell.
*******
I started and didn't finish this post about two weeks ago. The fat lady squeaked out a few notes but ran off the stage for a drink of water or something. Would you believe me if I said that in that span of time we had a contract on our house and made an offer of our own? But not on the house I mentioned above? And then in the space of about 12 hours, the entire thing fell apart and we can say with confidence that we will be living happily ever after for the foreseeable future in this lovely place we've called home for the last 2.5 years?
Suffice it to say, this has been a real roller coaster. And as we rode the ups and the downs, I just kept thinking about how we were voluntarily doing this to ourselves. It was stressful and so time consuming and actually quite emotionally consuming. And for the first time in my move history, this was happening not because our job was taking us somewhere, but because we looked at our home, full of too much stuff, and thought, "Man, wouldn't it be fun to pack up all this crap ourselves and move it a few miles!?" We questioned our sanity on more than one occasion.
Here's how it went down:
We were poised to make an offer on the house I mentioned above. We were almost ready to risk our savings on carrying both homes if our current one didn't sell. But then we started to get cold feet and began to doubt our decision.
Enter some friends of ours whose house was on the market and were shopping for a new place. We somehow got around to the arrangement that they would buy our home if we wanted to buy the other home. They were expecting an offer any day and while we all waited for it, Dan and I did some major soul searching to confirm this was the right thing for us.
We prayed and prayed and even fasted to know if this was the right choice. We could not come to a resolution, so when our friend's offer didn't come that weekend, by Sunday night we had pretty much decided we would stay put. The dirt road, the added 20 minutes to Dan's already hour long commute, the downgrade in school district, and the somewhat extensive and necessary renovations helped us feel a little better about walking away. And there was no one to buy our house anyway.
I knew it was the right thing, but I was still pretty bummed. I stopped by my friend Emily's house to return her canning supplies (I'm a grape juice goddess, remember?). Two years ago they made the move from the suburbs to property and have worked so hard and turned their place into a chicken, sheep, and bee haven. We commiserated together over our situation and I knew she felt my pain, because they looked for a long time before finding their home.
And sheesh! We weren't really even looking. I'm still not sure how we got to that place. But on my way home I started to think that if only I could find a house with land in our same school district, with no added commute time, in our same ward...that was the home we needed to find! And there is only one neighborhood that checks every single one of those boxes. So I drove through it. Just for fun. And I saw a house for sale. And I stopped and got the flier. You know, just for fun. And it looked like everything I'd been hoping to find, except a bit more more expensive but not requiring the renovations we'd planned for on the other house.
I told Dan about it that night and his mouth didn't say much, but his face told me to shut up.
And I knew he was right. We would find a house in a 1.5-2.5 years that would be perfect for us and our savings would be such that we could carry both houses without much risk. We needed to get off the roller coaster and go eat a corn dog.
But the next morning bright and early, I got a text from our friend, "We got an offer!" At once I realized that I had neglected to tell her we decided not to buy the house. But before I replied, I thought I should mention it to Dan, the plan could still work out. And that led us to actually looking at this second, "perfect" home before we told them we weren't going to move. And when I got inside, it was perfect. That night, Dan and I came back and looked at it together. Still perfect. And then we decided we wanted to buy it. One last visit with the actual listing agent to ask some questions about the well and the septic system and we were poised again to make an offer.
I asked Emily to meet us there to ask the well/septic question we didn't know to ask. But when she arrived and we were out in the yard with the agent, she walked up very strangely, told me her kids were freaking out in the car and left as quickly as she'd come.
As we walked through the house for the last time, I felt my phone buzz with a text in my pocket. It was from Emily. She said she was sorry she couldn't stay but when she saw that agent she had to leave because "they had a history".
Now, we were about to make an offer and we were about to do it without our own agent, because the home was more expensive than we'd wanted and we knew we could save the seller some money by not having an agent for them to pay, and hopefully get the house for a lower price. But the thing about that agent was she rubbed me the wrong way from the very first time I talked to her. And then when I met her in person, same thing, she gave both Dan and I the willies. And when Dan and I were speaking in private, trying to decide what to do and I showed him the text, he refused to make the offer with that agent until we knew "the history". I thought back to the nightmarish events Emily had shared with me of buying their home without an agent of their own two years ago and I started to have an inkling of what "the history" might be.
We told the agent we would be in touch and left. And that night we talked to Emily and my inclinations were correct. This was the same agent that had listed the home they bought 2 years ago, the agent of endless frustration, the author of nasty emails, and the source of tears, she was a near relative of the devil. At that point we decided we'd rather pay more and have a nice agent represent us. So we called up the woman who had been more than good to us, the listing agent on the original home we were looking at, who even after we had looked at that home multiple times and couldn't pull the trigger was never anything but cordial, kind, and professional.
She helped us line up the contracts with our friends and create an offer on the home we were now in love with. And as you can probably imagine, Devil Agent was not pleased when we showed up with an offer written by someone else. She had no qualms about expressing that to our agent over the phone and then again by email just in case their were any doubts.
We went ahead with our offer, despite Negative Nelly but while we awaited a response which she waited until the last 10 minutes before expiration to give, the buyer on our friend's home backed out. Later that night we received the news that our offer would not be accepted or countered. We were disappointed but not surprised though none of it really mattered because without a buyer for our friend's home, they could not buy ours, and we could not buy another.
It was kind of discouraging and our friend's decided to take their home off the market. And I set about trying mentally move out of the home I had mentally moved into (depsite my efforts to not get my hopes up) and to distract myself from thoughts of TPing a certain real estate agent's home.
Two days later, what should appear in our email inbox other than an email from Negative Nelly with a counter offer after all!
But of course we couldn't take it, because we had no one to buy our house.
I've had some time to process now, and I am still disappointed, and will probably always think back to how great that house could have been, but no less than one day later, I came across this meme and I sent it to Dan as fast as I could, because it's 100% true.
No comments:
Post a Comment