House Hunting

Hi Everyone,

First of all, it was great hearing from several of you yesterday.  I'm so glad that people are still interested in my blog since I've been so absent this summer.  I love hearing from you.  I haven't been reading many blogs lately, either, so I'm looking forward to going back and catching up.  I feel like I'm missing so much!

Can you believe that the summer is almost over?  School has been starting up all across the country.  I feel like I've missed most of it, but then, I'm not a big summer fan, so that's okay, too.  Usually I just hole up in the air conditioning and quilt.  I've barely stitched anything in over a month--I really need to change that!

The house hunting has gone great.  I find looking at homes to be pretty fun.  We looked at the serious contenders with our realtor, but then looked at others during the Open Houses, just to see what is out there.  Remember how yesterday I said that we fell in love with that first house we saw?  Once we got here and began looking at other internet favorites, I thought I would fall in love with all of them, too.  You see, for most of the past 25 years, we were offered a house by the Army.  We had two choices:  take it or leave it.  We took it and made the best of it.  Consequently, I am now trained to "like" most anything that we look at.  We did have some experience:  when we rented in Virginia, we looked at 4 houses and chose from those.  But anyway, I have liked many of the houses.  Don't get me wrong, there were some that we crossed off the list.  One, that I expected to really love, seemed all wrong.  There were two others, though, that I really liked, other than that very first one.  One of those had the most gorgeous kitchen as well as a pretty view outside--the only problem was that the garage was too small for my husband.  The second was great.  It had been owned only by one couple.  They are selling to move into a retirement home, I think.  It was so well cared for.  If anything needed replacing, the did with the best possible choice.  The only problem with it was that it was set up to be a villa.  I've never heard of that before, what it means here is that the owner pays $200 a quarter for all of the yard work to be done.  Many people may love this concept, but my husband really enjoys doing yard work.  He could still do it, but we would have to pay the fee anyway.  There is no way to change it, either, so that was a huge mark against that one.

Even though we had other possible houses, I still couldn't forget about that first one.  We had gotten a call when we were back in Virginia cleaning out the house.  There was an expected offer on it, and we were notified in case we wanted to make one of our own.  We discussed it.  At that time, it was still one of the only ones we had looked at.  We wanted to look at more, so we decided not to be pressured.  If it sold, that would be okay.  There would be other houses.  Every time I looked at the real estate websites, I expected to see that it was gone or "pending," but it wasn't.  So last Thursday, we went back to look at it--this time with our realtor.

Have you ever fallen in love with something that you saw briefly and then the distance from it increases your desire for it?  And then once you see it again, it doesn't measure up anymore?  Well, that wasn't the case with this house.  Our second time visiting, I knew it was THE ONE.  What's more is that our realtor, who is awesome at looking at all of the workings:  furnace, sump pump, radon detectors, etc., could find no problems with it, either.  We decided that we would meet again on Saturday to put in an offer.

We got back home that night and were bouncing around, all excited.  Then the realtor called and said that she had contacted the listing agent and there was another interested party.  Her advice was to meet on Friday to do the offer.  We met her at 7 pm on Friday to write up the paperwork.  We left about an hour later and she was sending it to the listing agent.  We just got home when the phone rang.  I was thinking that they accepted it already!!  No, that wasn't the case.  There was another offer in and so we needed to decide what was the best offer we could make.  Our realtor was with another client and she would call us back in an hour.  We discussed it, let her know, and then went back to her office to do the new bid.  We didn't get home until after 10 pm.

You might think that there was no way that we would be able to sleep, for the anxiety of not knowing how it would work out.  However, I was surprisingly at peace.  "If it is meant to be, it will be" was my motto.  My excitement had kept me up the previous night.  I slept fine.  On Saturday, my husband I stayed together most of the morning, in case the call came in.  Finally, around 10:30, he ran out to get the car washed.  I had already been to the car wash with him and our other vehicle, so I stayed home.  We really didn't expect to hear anything, though, until the afternoon.  And then my cell phone rang.

We got the house!  We will close at the end of September.  I'm still really excited.

Have a great day,
JoAnne

PS.  Now that the hunt is over, I hope to get back to sewing soon!