Saturday, April 12
We're driving down the street, heading for lunch. It's a fine Spring day, and Eric is flipping through a free home-buying magazine he's picked up from somewhere. He comes to a listing for a smallish house in the neighborhood of his work...and he thinks we can afford it.
This is new territory. Oh, we've looked at houses before, but it was usually at my initiative, and it never really got serious. We couldn't afford anything, we were looking at possibly moving to Wisconsin in the near future, and things were just too unsettled. Now we're actually playing ball.
Wednesday, April 16
Oh, my heart. We're actually meeting with a mortgage originator tonight. Grab the important documents, dress nicely (read: change into a shirt without visible stains on the front), hide the bitten nails and act collected.
Thursday, April 17
We're preapproved for a mortgage! Everything looks perfect, the (wonderful, sweet, marvelous) lady at the bank said. Now we can seriously house-hunt!
And so we did. The smallish house that started the adventure turned out to be just a little too small, but Eric decided that it was time to press forward. "There may never be a 'right' time to buy a house," he said, "but there are definitely 'wrong' times, and I'm afraid we'll find ourselves in one if we wait."
I'm not going to argue with that.
So we were home shopping. Looking at houses and knowing that this is serious, yet still noncommittal, is an exhilarating sensation. If a house met all of our criteria (three bedrooms; at least a crawl foundation; must have a basement, an attic, OR a garage; stay away from Toledo public schools), we could almost begin to visualize how we'd live in it.
We saw one that was almost perfect. It met our criteria, had a lovely newish kitchen, and had a finished basement with a fireplace and a huge, walk-in pantry. Yep, almost perfect. That is, except for the sale already pending on it. Though we crossed our fingers for something to go wrong, another buyer closed on it the next day. On to less sour grapes, I guess.
Thursday, April 24
We go to look at three houses (a fourth falls through, due to a delay in our arrival and a cranky seller). Two are okay. The third fills Eric with excitement and the thrill that tells him that this is it. There's a contingent offer on this one, meaning that something's holding back the sale, but our agent feels that we can get around that offer, especially considering that we have no house of our own to sell.
For myself, at first I wasn't nearly as excited as Eric was about this house. Yes, it was lovely, but it didn't have the same "model home" attraction that other homes had. It was obviously older, and the basement, even with the bar and the fireplace, was very much unfinished. I just wasn't immediately entranced by the place.
Overnight, though, the house haunted me. I began to think of ways to make the house more ours, more charming. The huge dormer bedroom upstairs could actually be divided with a screen to make a lounge. The basement could be carpeted, given drywall and a drop ceiling, and turned into living space with minimal effort. The positives, too, began to rise to the surface. The living room was alive with light, and the kitchen had a double oven with a separate range. The yard was large, and it had a built-in gas grill hooked into the house's gas line.
The house grew on me quickly and surely. I knew I was lost when we called the agent to get ready to write an offer, and she said that there might be a problem - and my heart leapt into my throat.
It turned out that the other buyer was a nervous young guy (only twenty-one, and buying his first home to move out of his parents' house) who was thrown by the fact that the basement had been water-proofed by a third party over five years ago. It had passed inspection, but he was walking away anyway. We went that afternoon with a flashlight to re-examine the basement ourselves; we could find no signs of water damage, and we learned that the water-proofing had a lifetime transferable warranty. We were even more determined to write an offer after hearing that. Of course, I was also more nervous after hearing that, since this guy's decision to back out of the offer, several more buyers had viewed the house.
This was Sunday. The earliest we could sit down and officially write the offer was Tuesday evening. In that time period, we voraciously researched, chewed nails, sought opinions, and argued with each other over how much to offer for the house. It was assessed for about $20,000 less than the asking price, so Eric was inclined to bid low; I was afraid to lose it to another bidder, so I wanted to bid high. Friends and family were all over the map with their opinions.
Somewhere in the middle of the nervous haze that surrounded me, I rammed my foot into a sofa and broke my toe, which is now alarmingly purple and swollen. It remains a non-priority for me in the face of the matter of The House.
We met with our agent last night, and I decided to let Eric make the choice. I had to admit that fear was keeping me from making a rational decision on my own, and he has much more calm than I was. He decided to bid low, but higher than some of our friends and relatives were advising. The agent agreed that the number he chose was probably a wise one, and we signed on the dotted line.
And now we wait. According to our offer, they have until seven tomorrow evening to give us their decision or a counter-offer. The selling agent told ours, though, that another buyer was having a second viewing of the house yesterday evening too, so I wonder whether the seller might not decide to wait until the last minute to see if that buyer makes a higher offer. The thought makes me slightly ill. I'm not cut out for this suspense.
I told Eric I didn't want to talk about the house until we knew what was happening. I don't want my heart to hurt if we lose it. You think I'm exaggerating, don't you? I'm not. I much preferred the house-searching part of this process, which in retrospect was just an elaborate form of pretend play.
In case you're curious, I took movies the last time we went out to the house. I was able to shoot three parts of the house before my camera started going wonky. I have no idea what's wrong with it, but I can't focus on that right now.
Here they are:
Outside the house (2.7MB)
The living and dining areas (2.2MB)
The kitchen (1.2M)
Is it my place, or what? Keep your fingers crossed that we get a good phone call soon, and that I'm still sane by the time we do.
| previous |
one year ago:
Little claw marks on my breasts and arms reminded me of similar ones I'd made in my own youth.
two years ago:
Stepping out of the pool carried with it a harsh realization of the huge weight I've been toting with me for the past few months.
three years ago:
Maybe it's a matter of poor memory; I'm always able to forgive and forget, because the forgetting makes the forgiving come naturally. |
next |
|
On the Stereo:
Silence
On the Bookshelf:
Hannibal
Gratuitous Sam
main
archives
notify
comments
weblog
|
