Direction Connection

At last, we’ve found it–a house that’s right for us. We realize we haven’t been at this for very long, and it may seem like we’re complaining, but the whole “hurry up and wait” nature of the house-hunt was beginning to wear on us. We were ready to be finished, even though we knew our house-hunt could still take quite a while longer. We were trying to pace ourselves. But it turned out that we didn’t have to!

Here’s the short story: We found a house we really like, that’s the right size, in one of our target neighborhoods, for less than we thought we’d have to spend in that neighborhood. And now we get to call it our own and move into it in a few short months. Scroll to the bottom of this post for pictures.

Here’s the whole story:  In late April/early May (?), Rebecca spied a house right around the corner from us that was up for sale. It looked good from the outside, sounded good from the description, and the price was right! Even though we didn’t yet have a realtor, we tried to call the sellers’ agent to set up a showing. We were very excited. But by the time we heard back from the realtor the next day, it had already been shown seven times, and there was at least one offer and one back-up offer on it. We didn’t even get to see the inside! The house sold even before pictures had been added to the MLS listing.

This spurred us to begin our search, though. We found a realtor, gathered income documentation, and met with a mortgage broker. We were all set. We saw a few houses, but only a few interested us, and none of those worked out. We were about to consider increasing our price range, to see if that opened up any other options for us.

And then, Friday morning, I rolled out of bed and immediately checked my email to see if we’d received an email from the MLS tool our realtor uses to send us new listings that meet our criteria. And there it was–THE house! The one we really really wanted back in late April/early May! I immediately barged into the bedroom and told Rebecca to WAKE UP, because the house on Green was back on the market!

Rebecca emailed our realtor, and called her, and called the realty company’s main line. It turns out our realtor’s son was graduating that day, and she had a conflict of interest on this property anyway,  so she set us up with another realtor to show us the house. At one point I announced to Rebecca that I wasn’t going to go to work until I saw the house. But then Rebecca talked some sense into me–we could see it that afternoon, so I could go to work and then come home after lunch, and we could see it then. I guess we must have made a nuisance of ourselves with our earlier calls, because no sooner had I gotten to work than I got a call from Rebecca saying that the new realtor could show it to us at 10:00. So I turned around. We saw it. We liked it. We met with the realtor later that afternoon to put an offer on it. And the next day (today), we heard back from the realtor a little after 11:00 that our offer was accepted! We’re very excited.

OK, here is a picture of the view of the house from the street:

And here are the inside pictures, starting to the left as soon as you walk in the door, and proceeding counterclockwise through the house (except there should be pictures of the second bedroom after the bathroom pictures, but we don’t have any pictures of the second bedroom):

Living room                        Dining room                     Kitchen

Family room                      Master bedroom

Bathroom shower             Bathroom counter

And here are pictures of the back yard and front porch (we’re getting the rocking chairs!):

We met the realtor at the house today to initial some amended paperwork, and the sellers were there. Also, our friends Molly and Susanne happened to be doing a drive-by of the new place at exactly the same time, so we took them through the house. We were so fortunate to be able to talk with the sellers, and to learn a little bit about the house’s recent history (it was built in 1900, so there’s certainly more that we don’t know). The sellers seemed very nice, and told us that if we were interested in any of the furniture or decorations, we should let them know. They’ll probably just give us some of them, but they’ll name a price for the other stuff. That’s good for them because they don’t have to move it, and good for us because we need furniture that will work in this space!

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 9th, 2007 at 9:40 pm and is filed under House. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.