indian givers

This morning we took our fate back in to our own hands, and rescinded our offer on the house. Why? Because we both had an uneasy feeling about it. Because our agent warned us that she was seeing too many red flags with the seller and his need to be in control. But mostly, because despite our like for the house, it wasn't a love worth going through you know what for, and we are fairly confident that our next three weeks would be a nightmare if we allowed it to move forward with this guy. Basically the seller indicated that he was going to come in and sign our offer, even though he was worried about it appraising for the amount we were offering. But, he also said that even if it didn't appraise for that amount, he wasn't going to accept less for it. The funny thing is that our agent seems to think he has this house paid off, plus he built it 5 years ago for about $65,000 less than his current asking price, so it's not like he has to be difficult for financial reasons. I don't really know what he is smoking, but I just wasn't willing to give him the opportunity to lock us in to anything, so our agent scrambled to get our signatures before he could sign the offer back to us. Square one is not my favorite place to be, but I guess it beats buying a house from someone who seems to think that markets, lenders, and appraisers are nuisances that must only be paid attention if he likes what they are telling him.

fabulous!

OK, I've freed myself of the secret and now all of these posts that I've been stewing over for the last month are going to come pouring out, I'm afraid. Starting with an Abbie funny, which actually happens to be house-hunting related.

So a few days ago we were driving around just to see what a certain part of town was like. The following conversation occurred.

Abbie: "Can we just turn around and go home?"

Me: "Not yet."

Abbie: "But none of these houses are our style."

Me: "And what is our style?"

(picture Sharpay from HSM2, with proper inflection)

Abbie: "Fabulous!"

I'm afraid that Abbie is in for a big disappointment, we will not be buying a pink house!

delinquent

I haven't truly posted since my return from Hawaii...eek! A while back I read this post from Kelly and she said the following which sums up my excuse for being delinquent.

"Sometimes there are things that you can't quite blog about yet, for whatever reason. Yet, it's an all consuming thing in your life, and you can't really think of anything else to blog about. And it just sort of becomes a vicious cycle."

So this has been me for the last month or so. And now, the cat is out of the bag, so to speak. You see, we are house-hunting. Not necessarily a problem, unless your good friend and landlord also happens to be your bishop's wife and they care whether or not you stay in the ward. When we moved in here, it was with no contract and was wide open as far as how long we stay, provided we give them a little notice when we leave. So, I wasn't worried that they would care about us moving out of their house. No. The problem is that there are not a lot of houses for us to buy in this ward. Jon has only been EQ President since November, so we feel a little guilty if we happen to buy in a different ward. But we don't feel like we should buy our real estate based on ward boundaries, either. And, we have looked at houses in every ward here. I haven't wanted to say anything until we actually had a contract in place, but yesterday at church I was talking with my friend and she brought the whole topic up out of the blue. She said she had just figured out that we were looking, although enough people around town knew about it (our mortgage office is full of people in the other wards) that the beans could have easily been spilled by someone else. In any case, they know, and now I can blog freely.

We have looked at a minimum of 30 houses, I kind of stopped counting. It's a challenge to balance Jon's must haves with mine, and find something that works for both of us. At first this whole process was fun, but it quickly became stressful. After seeing pretty much everything on the market that meets our criteria, with only a select few even making the "maybe" list, you get kind of discouraged. I guess that is one of the burdens of living in a small town, there are only so many neighborhoods out there that we are comfortable living in. It's not like we can go 10 miles north and just have a longer commute. That puts us in Olathe, and I think not. I honestly want to fast forward a few months and just have all the decisions made for me. Can anyone make that happen?

We actually have an offer in on this house. It is For Sale By Owner, although he is willing to allow a buyer's agent. The seller is a bit of a control freak, though. He wants to get full appraised value without having to make any concessions, which I think is totally unreasonable in this market, especially considering that the house has been on the market for about 10 months. While we have made a reasonable offer, and we like the house, we feel like we are the only ones willing to negotiate in this deal and a part of each of us is actually hoping that it doesn't work out.

We should know our fate by tomorrow afternoon.