Month: April 2018

A week in real estate

What a week we’ve had.  We bought and sold a house within the stretch  of 6 days! A whirlwind trip to Rochester results in offers on two houses, one successful.  We return to a few days of crazy preparation on the current house to have an accepted offer in less than 36 hours on the market!  Let me explain.  (No there is too much. Let me sum up.  🙂 )

While shopping for a house and contemplating what is important to us (see previous post), we found a house that wasn’t quite perfect but checked most of our boxes: relatively new, (slightly) bigger kitchen, soaking tub in the master bath (jacuzzi actually), fitted albeit compact closets in the master bedroom, an open “great room” off the kitchen, formal dining room, 3 car garage and lovely big backyard with patio.  It was just missing the formal living room.  The basement was unfinished but had potential for an updated man cave (Frank misses his pool table) and workout area.  It would take some work but it was doable.  It was in a slightly different area than we were originally looking (Webster versus Pittsford/Fairport) but had a reasonable commute for me and was close to Wegmans!  If you haven’t experience Wegmans, I feel sorry for you.  It is one of the things we are most looking forward to in our move.  And good wineries.  And mountains.  Oh, and my new awesome job.  Now we were hoping we had found a home to look forward too as well.

After spending Friday afternoon and all day Saturday traipsing around 14 houses, we made a second stop to the favored one on Sunday morning.  Then on Sunday afternoon we made a pretty common lowball opening offer: $12K under asking.  The current owners had only been in the house for 8 months and had priced it at $30K more than they had paid for it.  I’m all for free market commerce but that seems like a high return for a coat of paint and some new hardwoods.  They took several hours to respond to the offer – the agent said she couldn’t get a hold of them until about 8pm but it turns out that they had two more showings they were waiting for.  They countered right in the middle, splitting the difference between our offer and asking.  Unfortunately for them, Frank “Mr. Antsy Pants” couldn’t just sit and wait for their response and took to the online real estate sites where he found another house that had just been listed that day (who lists on a Sunday afternoon?) that seemed to check ALL the boxes.  We hastily made arrangements to see that house on Sunday night.

Yes, we were the obnoxious people who wanted to scope out a house at 7pm on a Sunday when the owner had to be there because of a sick child who couldn’t be spirited away on our whim.  Boy am I glad that Frank has no patience!  This house has (nearly) everything we could want. Certainly everything the other house had but with a formal living room, his and her walk in closets, a larger unfinished basement with taller ceilings and roughing for plumbing, on the end of a cul-de-sac.  It’s only 5 years old – newer than the previous house by 10 years – and nearly the same price! What is missing is the patio/deck but with an acre of land, we’ll have plenty of space to build one! (And yes, we know that one room requires some new paint.  I love most of the colors but pink and brown are not our thing!)

And with a deadline on the counter for the first house looming, we made an offer on the second house.  Since we were all convinced it was grossly underpriced, we didn’t want to start with the lowball offer so we went $5K under and it was accepted!  We flew home Monday with the comfort of knowing we had someplace to live. It’s roughly a 30 minute commute for me which is a little longer than what I was hoping for but still completely reasonable.  The other downside is that it is 15 minutes from Wegmans rather than 5 but we’ll learn to live with that.

Tuesday morning started the real chaos.  I went to work on the mortgage paperwork and Frank worked to finalize everything we needed to show our house.  Most of the interior paintwork was done while we were gone so there were only a few tidbits to be fixed on Tuesday and then all the furniture replaced in the staging arrangement.  Wednesday the photographer came and took all the amazing photos we needed to have people love our house.  While that was happening, Frank was frantically rolling out sod in the backyard to finally cover all the dirt that was still exposed from the construction of the garage last year.  Thursday had a flurry of paperwork and approvals and the listing went live on Friday around noon.

Now the tables were turned.  Whereas the previous week, we had been kicking people out of their homes so we could wander through their lives, it was now our turn.  Four showings on Friday afternoon meant that Frank and Buddy had to drive around KC until I got off work and we could grab some dinner.  Luckily it was a cool cloudy day so Buddy could hang out in the car while we ate.  The texts came in all through dinner setting up showings for Saturday so it was clear we had to be scarce from 10am through 3pm. So we ran as many errands as we could think of: going to the farthest Whole Foods, then heading back into town for Record Store day, grabbing lunch out in the burbs again near where I was headed for my 90 minute massage (heaven!) while Frank and Buddy toured various parking lots and did more driving.

Later that afternoon, we got the standard lowball offer – $15K under asking – and countered with $5K under which was immediately accepted.  And like that, we are done.  There is still the inspection to deal with which I think will be more challenging than the one we had on the 5 year old home. But for now we can stop hiding the toaster oven in the basement and can actually cook dinner without worrying about the smell of lasagna “messing up” the curb appeal. We still have the challenges of arranging movers around staggered closing dates and trying to squeeze a visit to the family in Scotland as well. But for now we have a period of relative calm to appreciate how lucky we are, especially given our last foray into the housing market, and plan for all the fun things that come with a new home.

 

 

 

Letting go

We’ve just spent 4 days wandering around Rochester trying to find a house. (We have an accepted offer but until we get through the initial stages, I don’t want to say anything that might jinx it!) In the process, of driving all over eastern Monroe county and traipsing through more than a dozen houses, we had lots of opportunity to reflect on what is important to us and what is not. None of the houses were perfect – we knew we wouldn’t find that – so we needed to figure out which kind of imperfect was best for us.

One of the lessons we learned from our soujourn in KC is that we are not “quaint little house” people. While we still love our quirky little Brookside bungalow, we had to let go of the notion that the charm of a 90 year old house outweighed the pain of the upkeep for us. It wasn’t that there was so much work to do really; it was more that everything that needed done was just that much harder. For example, it’s a plaster and lathe house so even fixing the ceiling in the foyer when the bathtub above leaked meant a lot more work than just some drywall and mud. So for this go round, we decided to look at newer houses. Although there was nothing wrong with the houses from the 20th century, they felt very dated and not what we had in mind.

The second thing we had to think carefully about was space. While we know that we have downsized just a *little* too much in our move to KC, we weren’t sure exactly how much space was the right amount. We saw several gorgeous houses that were upward of 3500 square feet – comparable to what we had in VA before we gave away all the furniture that you need for a house that size. We had to let go of the idea that more is always better and find a happy medium between our current cozy 1800 square feet and the cavernous homes that we could afford to buy but not furnish.

And lastly, we had to really focus on how the space was distributed. We are still of the “formal living room and dining room” generation. I like having a room with comfy seating and no TV and another room to have Christmas dinner. Apparently, that isn’t how youngsters roll these days so builders concentrate on “great rooms” off the kitchen and “morning rooms” where you do all your eating. We nearly needed to let go of our antiquated floor plan requirements but we were lucky enough to find a 5 year old house that was built for people like us. Instead, I needed to let go of the notion that I needed a separate study. I have one now where I do all my school work (lecture prep, grading, etc.) but since I have promised Frank that I will only have one job (at least for a while 🙂 ), I don’t really need a study. (Then again, we have an extra bedroom upstairs so maybe I just need to let go of the first floor qualifier….)

So stay tuned to see what we gained when we let go.