I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For

Is it better to have loved and lost or to never have loved at all? We have found two houses that we loved and lost out on them both. Today I was hoping the third one was going to be the charm, but alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

On paper this house was fabulous. It exceeded all of our wants, it was in the location that we really like and the price is sort-of right. The reason I say that is, it is a short sale. No one knows what it would really, actually, sell for. Only 10% of short sale offers are accepted so that leads me to believe that it wouldn’t actually sell for the good listing price.

Esthetically the outside of this house is close to my ideal, or at least it was in its heyday. As it is right now the rock is crumbling, the beams need painting and the front yard is in need of a lot of TLC. The backyard, well there is no backyard. There is a lot of space however that would cost a lot to landscape. Right now the cool thing is they are growing some of the most ginormous weeds we have ever seen. They were quite remarkable actually. If one was so inclined one could possible build a tree house in them.

The inside was not at all my taste. Could I live there? Sure. Would it be an improvement? Of course. I would want to make changes though and that wouldn’t be in the budget. The colors were too dark, the finishes were not good in my humble opinion (I don’t need a compass rose inlaid in the tile entry), and the attention to detail was poor to say the least. There were several holes in the ceiling, gaps in grout, holes in finished walls and one room had so many cords vomiting out of the wall it was unreal.

There are renters in it now. They have left their mark in the form of Sharpie on the walls, stains on the carpet and an unidentified stench coming from the kitchen that was permeating the whole house. The children were really enjoying their game of soccer in the finished basement. There’s nothing like doing a walk through while dodging soccer balls that are bouncing off the walls. While the place is huge, and I do mean huge, it doesn’t seem to flow as well as the other houses. There were awkward cubbyholes of wasted space here and there.

Getting back to the fact that it is a short sale. Because of that we can’t make a contingent offer. We don’t want two mortgages so even if we could afford both houses we wouldn’t make an offer yet. (We may or may not be able to qualify for both. We don’t care to do the research to find out since we don’t want to find ourselves in that scenario.) That leaves us only one option before we can do anything else.

We are back to thinking that we are going to list our house for sale. The numbers our realtor throws out are not in our favor. He says that the houses that are selling are the ones priced at $60-$70 a square foot. That means we would have to price it below what we paid six years ago. We still can’t do that. We are going to have faith and follow the feeling that this is the time to do something. Only time will tell where that will lead us.