April 06, 2015

The House: Part 2

If you missed it, you'll really need to go read the First Part  to this story, so that you can get the FULL EFFECT of what my story is trying to portray.  And once you have gotten yourself fully caught up and "in the zone" of our story, let us continue with....

I HATE HOUSE HUNTING!!! OMG IT IT AWFUL. For one thing, since the beginning of time I have had the unique "problem" of decorating and redesigning imaginary houses in my head. And now that I was faced with REAL houses that might POSSIBLY become my own, every new house that we went to see I would immediately go home and lay in bed and redo and decorate and position furniture in until Kingdom or Dawn came. ( It was always Dawn...). It. was. exhausting. 
BUT the real problem came when we would actually put an offer on a house. Oh boy. I thought it was bad before, but then things got REALLY serious in Abigail's Imagination World. 

The first house we found that we were interested in had fruit trees in the front yard, had been renovated fairly recently, had three good sized bedrooms and 2 and half bath ( the half bath being off of the kitchen in the laundry room, just in case you HAD TO GO while you were doing a load of Whites), and Dun Dun DUNNNNNNNN. A little office off of the kitchen/dining room. "It would be "perfect" for a little "guest room"!!"  I thought to myself! AND because it isn't technically a "bedroom" I bet the taxes are cheaper!! HOORAY! It is the PERFECT HOUSE! Except for the tiny detail in the back yard. What's that?!?! A POOL!?!?! IN THE BACK YARD? INCHES FROM THE BACK DOOR!?!?! 
*sigh* yes. And no matter what my realtor told me about how "awesome" pools where, my many years of lifeguarding could only see my children floating facedown. 

But. I couldn't get past the fruit trees, it being in our price range ( pretty important) and that teeny tiny "guest room" that, to me and my prayer card meant it MUST BE MEANT TO BE! 

So we put in our offer and we waited. And I repositioned furniture at night, and showed pictures of the house to my friends during the day. I could HARDLY WAIT to see if it would be ours! Sure, I kept having flashes of drowning children and the niggling feeling that I would never really be able to sleep well knowing I had a DEATH TRAP literally in the back yard, but I researched safety fences and waited. 
We did not get the house. 

I was devastated. Mostly because I was tired of moving furniture around in my head, because at the end of the day I was really quite relieved that a Pool was not in our future. At least for at least 5 to 10 more years. 

Weeks passed and we found another house. It was on a horse-shoe shaped street, where the two ends dead-ended into a park. The house was towards the "U" part of the street ( so definitely no thru traffic here!) and was gorgeously renovated, and it didn't have a pool. It had MORE CLOSETS THAN I CAN COUNT. ( seriously, I was giddy about the closets) AND AND AND!!!! It also had an "office" off the laundry room/kitchen that would make the perfect "guest room!" AND this one was BIGGER! HOORAY! This house was DEFINITELY for us!!! I loved, loved, loooooved it. Nevermind that the whole backyard was terraced and Brett was worried the kids might fall, or that the front yard was at a drastic 45 degree angle...IT WAS PERFECT.  We made an offer. And I started to mind-decorate every inch of the house in my head.  I was sure this was the one. I even had little "good moral there, God!" blog posts written up about how this house had an even bigger "guest bedroom" than that last house and how I had just needed to be patient! Good, one God, good one! The wait was longer this time, and there was even a little negotiating- they wanted a LOT for the house, and we ended up going up more on our offer than we ever thought we would before the floor finally fell out. 
We did not get the house. 

And so ALL OF FEBRUARY went by and NOT ONE new house, in our price range and in the area that we really felt like was where we were suppose to be, came on the market. NOT ONE. 

And then March happened. Two new houses came up and we went to look at them even though the pictures did not look promising. We had spent weeks now, widening our search and wondering what was going wrong, so we were feeling desperate. The first house was "Ok" but had the craziest back yard I've EVER seen. Imagine an "island" of dirt smack dab in the middle!...yeah. It was special. 
And so on we went to the next house. It was the COLDEST day we'd had all year and I really just wanted to go home and cuddle by the fire, but I felt committed to doing our due diligence....

The second house of the day just so happened to be on the other side of the horse-shoe street as the last house we had put an offer in.....in fact they literally backed up to each other and shared an alley! That was a curious coincidence....So I walked in the front door....

STAY TUNED to the exciting conclusion of The House.....Part 3!

1 comment:

Carley said...

Haha! "Mind-decorating!" I do that too...but usually in an attempt to fall asleep (I never make beyond a room or two before I pass out). I'm looking forward to part 3! (We rent...I think I'm living vicariously through this story. Is that weird?)