The Frayed Ends of Sanity: Pink Trees: Part 3: In This Together

Cydny called and said it's time to start looking. We pulled up some houses online that we thought looked interesting, and she pulled some up too. Blow #1 - all the really good looking ones were priced that low because they were Foreclosures or Short Sales. We didn't have the time or energy to go through that process. It could be really long, and often unsuccessful. She filtered out most of the ones we had pulled up. The selection was getting slim. (I just went searching for my folder of flyers I had, and realize that I still hate looking back on all this!)

On a Tuesday, while the kids were at school, we went out with Cydny to look at houses. I took the stack of papers, and made notes on them. Here are some of my notes:

"Blue" The interior of this house was blue. All rooms painted in shades of blue. All blue carpet.
"Purple" This one had a lot of purple carpet, and about 4 different types of floorings... wood, laminate and tile.
"Italian Restaurant" Featuring fake tile and no yard.
"Small"
"/" ... due to zero lot line
"Road Noise"
"Potential"
"X" ... on corner of 2 busy streets
"Smoke"
"Power Lines" At least one of the houses that resided near to power lines was pretty nice. Cydny and Mike had to let me know that it wouldn't be a good move. I didn't think it was that big a deal, but they were probably right.

We were kinda laughing at our poor luck, a little bit. It was getting a bit scary though. Although our little house was so small, at least it was already fixed up and in a good location. But, oh yeah, it was sold.

Sunday. We left the kids with someone (sorry, I can't remember who helped us that day... but I think it was Susan). We 'upped' the price range a little bit to get some new options, and counted on the poor sellers' market to work in our favor for negotiations. More powerlines, but we saw a couple decent ones this time. Gave us a little hope.

Then an open house... Wow... This looks good... Besides needing a new shake roof, this place was good. It was priced to sell quickly as the owner had to move back East. It was on a nice culdesac and backed up to a greenbelt. Make an OFFER NOW. So we did. There was already one other offer on it, so the owner had to choose. Cydny wrote up a really nice cover letter to tell them how nice our little family was and the youngest boy still sucks his thumb, so cute... etc...
We hoped and prayed. Although we were praying that if it's the right place, we'd get it, I think we meant "Please let us have it, please let us have it!" We could deal with needing a roof. Monday, we got the word. We did NOT get it. Oh great. Now what? There's nothing else out there!

You know why we didn't get that house? Because God already had chosen a better one, and we'd see it the next day. We scrounged around online and found a couple more. I think we went out on Tuesday again. Drove down one street and didn't even stop in. Then we drove up the road a ways, following the directions to this last one. We turned down this really well maintained street with all the beautiful pink trees in bloom. I was thinking we would just pass through this nice area before we hit the scud property, as usual. Not so. Looks neat and clean on the outside. Culdesac. Quiet. Let's go in and see what's wrong with it. Staged. Clean. Neutral colors. Large kitchen. Tri-level. Moose mural in kids' room. Large cement patio and landscaped back yard. Good roof. Good paint. Ummmmmmm... why is this priced like this? (It was AT our price point). There has GOT to be something wrong with it, but we couldn't see anything. Cydny called the other realtor over the phone and told him we would make an offer. We went home and tried not to get our hopes up...