The Long Anticipated House Post - Part 2

If you missed the riveting Part 1 of this story, you can read it here.

When I last left you, the closing had just fallen through on a house we'd been anticipating moving into for the past three months. We were definitely disappointed.

That evening, I decided to do a quick search to see what the current inventory of houses for sale looked like, something that I'd been doing regularly even with a contract on a house (I just can't help myself). Lo and behold, a listing I hadn't seen before popped up.


It was for a 5 bedroom/2.5 bath house that would be close to 4,700 sq ft once the basement is finished (as a comparison, we currently live in a 1,000 sq ft condo). It is in the most "exclusive" neighborhood in the city - which we're talking about a small town here, folks, so that's why I put that word in quotes. But, the few $1 million+ houses in the city are in this neighborhood.

But this wasn't a new listing. So, you ask, why did it just now appear within my search terms? Because it had just been reduced by $80,000! And, when it first went on the market almost two years ago, it was over $125,000 higher than the current list price. Holy cow, that's a lot of money. Guess we should be thankful for a bad housing market!

Hubby and I decided to go see the house. What's the harm, right? Hubby reminded me several times beforehand that we were just looking and that we should still be in the mourning process for the old house. "Right, right," I replied.

So, we go see the house. And we fell in love! The house is just perfect for us. While there are definitely some upgrades that we'll do (mainly the kitchen - it has great cabinets, but needs new countertops - and then finishing the basement), it is in perfect move-in condition. It has space for hubby and me to both have an office. And a GIGANTIC room over the TWO CAR garage that will be an unbelievable playroom for Emma.

Everything we were "giving up" with the old house - a garage, an eat-in kitchen area, a big master bedroom, a big master bathroom, closet space, an extra bedroom or two - is just perfect in this house. And, unlike the other house where we were going to spend at least $35,000 just to get it ready to move in, all we'll do is change out the carpet in the bedrooms and paint. And, voila, we'll move in.

Other pluses of this house...it is about a 3 minute walk from where Emma will go to Kindergarten through fifth grade. Yes, folks, I'll be able to walk my daughter to school which charms the pants off me. The school has a great playground, which we'll get a lot of use out of. And the house is about a 5 minute walk to the swimming pool that we'll join. While it isn't right off the main street like we wanted, it is only a little over a mile away, so still walkable.

And the other upside to this story is that we made an offer on the house around 8am the next morning and the whole negotiation was done by about 4pm that day (and we got it for even less than list price for a total of $135,000 less than when it was first listed). So totally opposite from the long drawn-out process we'd just gone through. The appraisal and inspection are already completed and we are scheduled to close on February 18th.

We are so excited about this house. For some reason, I guess because of the weird process with the other house, we never let ourselves get too excited because we felt like it could fall through at any minute (and we were right). And while something unexpected could still happen, the odds are really good that this will be our house in a month and a half. Yay!

Now, we just need to sell this darn condo (but that's another plus...if we had closed on the first house over Christmas, we'd already be paying two mortgages. But now we have a little bit longer to try to sell our condo. Glass half full!)