The Story of our Second House, Part 1

Greetings from a scrambled-eggs-for-brains Mama.  My revenge of the 5th this year was staying up until 11:30 last night making phone calls and emails to set up new-house things... washer/dryer, new gas stove with installation, a cleaning service because the tenants living there before us unexpectedly left things pretty filthy, trying to get a modem/router in time to set up internet late this week so I can teach my virtual lessons next week, discussing getting a guy to come and give us a quote for gutters (who builds a house without rain gutters??), and deciding on a contractor for trash removal........

My Starbucks is tasting extra good today.

I don't have many interesting pics on my phone this week-- it is mostly screenshots of my dream dining room, photos of pieces of furniture that were "maybes" at a trip that N and I made to the ReStore last Friday, and measurement photos that M sent me of spaces in the new house.  Did I mention we had a successful closing on Monday??  Well, maybe in the absence of pictures and kid updates today, I might just back up to the very beginning of our house hunting story and give you the whole scoop.  Like, Story of our House style.  Sound okay?  Let's do it.

Sooooo.... let's start with M's new job.  You may be asking, why a new job when you only just moved two years ago to be closer to M's current job, and so that the girls could be in school with him, living in the same town as he worked?  Well, the answer to that question is pretty much...... COVID.  In a pre-COVID world, the plan was that we would settle in to our closer-to-Boston rental home, bide our time and save money for a bit, and eventually purchase a home there.  Best laid plans, right??  When COVID hit last March, first of all M's employment field of education sort of got turned on its head-- not only was everyone crazy busy and scrambling and trying to adjust to it all but because the economy was also simultaneously tanking, school budgets were up in the air and questions about cutting teacher positions were on everyone's mind.  It was at that time that M started putting out some job applications, sort of as a precautionary measure.  When the opportunity came around for him to interview for this job further west, closer to where we used to live, I remember agonizing with him over whether he should even take the interview.  Were we crazy to be thinking of uprooting our family again?  We had so much decision fatigue after all the events of 2020 that we could barely even wrap our heads around it.  But in the end we decided he should do it, and we felt we could probably read the signs as they came and figure out what to do next.

Of course he was offered the job almost immediately after the interview.  At the same time as all this was happening, we were keeping our eyes on the close-to-Boston housing market, and prices were just skyrocketing, despite the economic slump.  Our hopes of being able to afford a home in that area were dwindling.  Meanwhile, we were seeing some beautiful homes come on the market in central MA-- homes in our price range that were big enough for our family-- homes that we wouldn't be "settling" for.  I had also just picked up a few virtual students from the central MA district where I had taught before, and there seemed to be demand there from even more potential students for me.  I was also still doing singing gigs in that area.  We thought and thought about whether to take the job and, decision-fatigued as we both were, we said that M would make one more salary negotiation and if they said no to the salary he wanted, that would be the end of it.  Guess what?  They said yes.  We took that as our sign and he took the job.  Just before February vacation of 2021 he started commuting west, and we started house hunting.

As per the usual house hunting, we looked at a lot of places-- some okay (smack dab in the middle of our price range) and some really great (usually towards the top of our price range).  But thanks to the nest egg of profit from the sale of our first home two years ago, the not-so-great things were more minor-- things like, only three bedrooms as opposed to four or five.  Or a smaller yard.  No roofs caving in or structural instabilities or 70-year-old electrical wiring or anything like that.  So it really was quite a different experience than shopping for our first home.

The very first home M and I looked at together we really liked (except for a few small things, like the yard was really small).  There were enough things we loved about it, however, that we decided to make the offer the next day.  It was in the upper end of what we could afford, but not at the very top of our price range.  By the time we called our realtor, however (and this was less than 24 hours after we viewed the home, and it had only been on the market two days) the owners were already under agreement with another buyer.  We weren't terribly disappointed, because there were a few things we would have been settling for in that house-- the small yard, and there were only three bedrooms.  But this was January, not even prime season for home shopping... and this home was snapped up within two days.  So that was our first hint of what was to come with the housing market in the next few weeks.

(the first house we looked at-- nice, right?)

For the next few weekends, and over the February vacation we set up appointments to look at several other homes-- I think we probably looked at five or six in those two weeks.  Many of these showings were being squeezed in between other showings-- I had to wait for one family to leave, had 15 minutes to look at a property, and then another family was coming in as I was leaving-- that type of thing.  Our realtor told us that one of the properties we looked at booked 70 showings in one weekend.  70.  Crazy right??? (By the way, we hired the same realtor we used to buy our first home, who is absolutely wonderful, and I credit her with our good luck on both home buying experiences.)

So at one of those showings I found what I thought would be our dream home-- four bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms, a long driveway on a not-busy road, a detached carriage house garage, beautiful views of the nearby mountain through the dining room, five acres of land... I fell in love at first sight and although the asking price was at the very top of our range, I felt we had to make the offer.  M wasn't with me for that showing, but we had seen enough properties together at that point that he trusted my instincts and we knew from past experience that we had to act quickly.  I saw the property on a Friday afternoon before it was even officially listed (thanks to our realtor for the inside scoop on that one) and we made the offer that evening.  We were able to offer the asking price which felt good, but our realtor suggested that we include a letter with the offer introducing ourselves and telling the sellers what we loved about the house.  We all kind of knew that they would get offers above the list price.  So we wrote the letter, talking about our family and our girls, how the home was perfect for us, etc.  Then we waited out the weekend and crossed our fingers.

Dreamy right?

On Monday we got the news:  we were outbid by $20,000.  The sellers had received an insane amount of offers-- I can't remember how many it was, but I remember my mind being blown when I heard the number.  Of course they would choose the highest bidder-- who wouldn't?  And this was our introduction to the bidding wars of 2021.

And so it seemed that every property we were looking at was either snapped up more quickly than we could get out there to see it, or selling for crazy amounts more than list price-- in one case a property we looked at sold for $60k more than they were asking.  These bidding wars were causing homes to sell for more than their appraised value... so that began to scare us a little.  We didn't want to be paying more for a home than it was worth.

Enter our wonderful realtor again.  She had heard of a property that was not on the market, but the owner (who wasn't living there) wanted to sell from afar without the hassle of listing.  It was being rented at the time.  Our realtor advised us to google it, find what pictures we could from previous sales of the property, and see if we might be interested.  The only catch was that we couldn't see the property until a certain date-- for some sort of unknown reason that was between the owner and the tenants.  So we would be making this offer sight unseen, with the contingency that upon seeing the property we were allowed to back out and change our minds with no financial losses, if it wasn't what we expected.

The date they gave us for being able to see the property was about three weeks away from when we first heard of it.  After thinking about it, we figured the only thing we had to lose was three weeks of being free to shop in the market.  What if our *real* dream house came up sometime in those three weeks, and we weren't free to move on it because we were already under agreement? 

After more thinking, and considering the way the market was going, and looking at the pictures we could find of this property and seeing how nice they looked, we decided it was a risk we were willing to take.  We would lose three weeks on the market, yes, but at least we wouldn't be in a bidding war with anyone else, and if he accepted the price we offered then that was that.  So we wrote it up, offering what the property was worth at the time, which was near the top of our price range, but doable.  We heard back in a few days that the owner had accepted!

So then we had three weeks of sitting on our hands.  But it wasn't, really.  It was actually pretty nice to have a break from worrying about it all.  We couldn't really allow ourselves to get excited one way or the other, so I think M and I just kind of put it all out of our heads for that time, and focused on the day-to-day tasks at hand, of which there are always plenty in 2021.  And funnily enough, nothing really came on the market during that time that we would have gone to see.  If we did see something nice, we sort of just knew that it was going to be the same old story-- thousands of people clamoring to see it, immediate offers, bidding war... and there wasn't a dream house that really jumped out at us during those three weeks, as something that would be worth going through all of that.  So that seemed to be a good sign that we were moving in the right direction.

So... I'm out of time for today, and this is probably a good stopping point in the story, anyway, so... I guess there will be a part 2!  I can't promise that it will be finished until next Wednesday, but, um, well... stay tuned!

Read part two here!