House Hunting: Progress Has Halted
It’s no secret that we were feeling a tad bit devastated after the news surrounding our potential new home. Walking away wasn’t an easy decision, though in hindsight our home inspection report should’ve made that a no-brainer, but home buying is a rather emotional thing when you get down to it. It has to speak to you when you step through the door for the first time and I’m talking about that surreal sensation of ‘welcome home’.
When we first decided that it was time to close the door on farm life and look towards moving back to the city, both the Mr and I agreed that location would be our priority. With that in mind I’d set off with our realtor and walked through over a dozen properties within our desired neighborhood over a span of seven hours trying to determine if any would prove ‘the one’. It was just a run of bad luck (or was it?) that ‘the one’ wasn’t something we could sign on for after the astonishing 67 page report of recommended repairs.
So came about our dilemma …in order to appease the seller of the home we had wanted, we’d moved quickly to get everything together to close within a 21-day turnaround. This was made possible as we had already found a buyer for our farm and that they were able to close pending a home inspection. From our standpoint as sellers, it couldn’t have worked out better. I mean seriously, how often do you hear folks talking about house-hunting for “a quaint horse farm just off the beaten path”. Naturally we were ecstatic. That feeling lasted until we had to walk away from ‘the one’ that we had had under contract. We’d gone overnight from being on track to move to now soon to be homeless buyers as we were no longer under contract, our runner ups that we’d toured were under contract, and …oh yeah… we were closing on our farm in less than 14-days time. To be frank, it was a VERY stressful time for us.
Back to the drawing board we had only one option – keep looking. My realtor hadn’t heard of any new or upcoming listings in our preferred area but we both set to searching. I happened to come across one that was set to hit the market the following morning. With luck, it was within our desired neighborhood, right in the heart of it actually, and the home looked positively charming. The drawback (there always has to be something) was we would be stretching our budget once again but on paper it had everything we were looking for in our new home. Of course there was also the fact that no one else had toured it yet. #smallfavors
Considering we’d felt gutted the night we rescinded our offer from ‘the one’ only to then find this listing… We both felt as though we’d been tossed a life-preserver. After all, everything happens for a reason right?
Feeling optimistic for the first time in days, I scheduled a tour for first thing the following morning once the listing would be officially active. Too easy, silly me, silly me. As it turned out, our realtor was unavailable to show us the home that day. Luckily she found another realtor in her office that was available to meet me so that I would be the first to see it.
Despite the myriad of setbacks I found myself parking in the driveway the next morning. Unfortunately, the online images offered were limited and didn’t offer much beyond a description of the home’s amenities. While the exterior lived up to the listing’s image, there was a new house to explore. Once again the game was afoot!
Cheers!
~Christy
