We have been remiss in keeping our readers apprised of all that is going on in our lives…..because of all that is going on! It is hard to find time to stop and catch our breath, let alone post!
For those of you who don’t know, we’ve been actively househunting for almost a year. We live 17 miles away from the kids’ school (that’s 34 miles roundtrip), and the commute has been something we wanted to change ultimately. So after a couple years of watching the market and planning, we began looking seriously for a new home. We have been targeting a fairly particular geographic area, and waiting for a “deal” to pop up within that. Given how few homes generally list for sale within there that meet our search criteria pricewise, we assumed it would be better to find the new home before we started selling the old. So we looked and looked and looked some more. Though we submitted a couple offers over the past months, nothing had ended up working out.
Then in June we came across a FSBO home in our favorite neighborhood – it was in our price range and we loved the floor plan, yard, room sizes, etc. It needed some “love” but we figured we had it in us to offer it that. So, excitedly, we made an offer, had an inspection, negotiated the sellers down a bit more to allow for some of the repairs, began packing up our current home and doing all the final prep work to list it, only to have the deal fall through a couple weeks before close. This was a big letdown, but the situation just obviously wasn’t supposed to work out. (Btw, I am sparing you gentle readers by giving you a VERY high level view here – this was one of the craziest months of our lives and all that went on during the transaction would likely take a book to give a proper account!)
Well anyway, we went back to looking, but given summer was mostly over, I assumed we’d probably be staying where we were for quite some time to come. We accepted the idea that we’d likely be continuing the commute through this school year as well, and even found a nearby school family with whom to share driving responsibilities. Though still keeping my eye on the market, I turned more of my attention to enjoying the home we already had, and even spent some time working on beautifying and “loving” it. Over the last year, I’d sort of neglected doing much of that given I figured our time here was limited. But I found that enjoying the place we had was actually a very valuable and good thing. Wanting to find a different house had caused me to appreciate less the wonderful blessing that our current house was to our family.
There’s a certain irony associated with the fact that just as I was getting comfortable with the notion of hanging out here for awhile to come, things began working out on the househunt front. But that is a story for another night….
(stay tuned)
Do hope you can post the “rest of the story” soon. Looking forward to it!!
What? Noooo! Come back, dear Trishie! I know how it ends, of course, but I need the details to fill in the gaps! Come back! More more more!!!