The Roller Coaster

For the past week, Mark and I have been riding the house-hunting roller coaster. Sunday morning we innocently decided to take Winston and Carter for a walk in the woods near where we used to live. It's an area we love and would love to move back to, but there's never anything for sale, much less in our price range. Well, we just happened to drive by a great house right on the creek that was for sale. Even though we thought it would be way out of our price range, we thought we'd just call to see. Our former realtor answered and even recognized us. The house was much lower priced than we thought, so we set up a showing for that afternoon. And we fell in love with the place. It seemed so serendipitous that it was meant to be.

And that's when we boarded the roller coaster. We began talking about making an offer, then found out someone already had and were in the process of going under contract. Then the contract fell through but we found out about foundation problems. During all of this, Mark and I are trying to learn about how to sell our house while under contract with another house. An "offer with a contingency" entered our vocabulary. We learned about bridge loans and first right of refusal. We had a comparative analysis done to estimate what we could get for our house and became fluent in using the mortgage calculator. We crunched numbers and tried to figure out what our income would be when I start my new job. And we worked on scheduling showings at other comparably priced properties in the area. Did I mention this was all done over three days? With full-time jobs and a toddler? Oh, and WInston got sprayed by a skunk on Wednesday.

So, after all that, we finally decided it was too much of a risk too far out of our price range with too little information. After feeling like the house was slipping through our fingers as other people were preparing to make offers, we finally let it go. It was sad to feel like we were giving up an opportunity that wouldn't come along again, but a bit of a relief to not wonder whether we were rushing in too fast without all the facts.

But of course, now that we've started the process, it's hard to stop. I already have another house I want to look at and have begun thinking about what we need to do our house to get it ready to show. But I think we'd both like to wait until we know what my salary will be (kind of an important unknown) and know we'll be in town for awhile (we're out of town for what feels like most of June). We'll see. I think we've stepped off the roller coaster for now, but we're already in line to ride it again soon.