The Waiting Game

We found a house.  Maybe?

Last night after work N and I went out to see the Marshall foreclosure mentioned at the end of the last post.  It was a wet and drizzly evening, but warm.  We met up with our realtor at about 8:30 to take a look at the house.

The exterior was not easily appreciated by flashlight, but the pictures N had taken during a visit earlier in the day show off the very nice (and expensive) landscaping work that had been done.  There is some sort of leak in a water line at the very front end of the property that was shooting 2-foot jets of water into the air every 10 seconds or so.  So that needs fixing, but it's something that the bank could reasonably be expected to do as a condition of purchase.

Small porch that would be just big enough for a chair.  Large open living/dining room floorplan with cathedral ceilings and lots of windows in the living room.  Off to the other side of the house (at the front) is a master bedroom with another cathedral ceiling/windows.  It's a little small, with odd angles, but has nice hardwood floors and a lovely (if small-ish) master bath.  The main living space, it flows from the dining area to a nice big kitchen with tons of cabinets and pretty granite countertops.  Needs a fridge but the other appliances are relatively recent.  There is a breakfast bar, as well as eat-in kitchen that is a bit on the narrow side and might not actually work as eat-in.  The reason for that is that you wouldn't want to block access to the stairs to the gigantic deck in the backyard. 

But I digress.  Off of the living room is a cute little office that has sliding doors with panes.  They need to be rehung but it's a great idea - you can close that room off if you have important work to do, or open it up to the rest of the living space.  It connects (as does the living room) to a hallway with a small (kid's) bedroom (lime green trim, anyone?), a full hall bath, and a second master bed/bath.  The second master has more useful space (ie. it's square) but the closet needs some work and the bathroom does too.  Bathroom is teensy and needs paint and a new floor ASAP.  The hall bathroom could use a new floor too...as well as a way to hide the heater.

Backyard is not huge but is big enough, and has a nice tall fence.  Large nice-looking shed which must be intended for workspace since this house is all on one floor and has no basement.  Backs up to the local rec center's park/baseball fields, which are not lit and are not open at night.  The previously mentioned deck is gigantic and very nice.  Plenty of room for a large table with chairs and container gardening to boot.If we were to acquire this property N's not sure he could wait until his birthday to get an outdoor BBQ to put on the deck. 

This house has some really neat touches.  I love the fancy molding in the entryways between kitchen and living/dining space (and that there are two such entryways).  The open layout is neat and the office is adorable.  The kitchen needs to be painted but it's otherwise quite nice and has lots of space.  We love love love all the windows.  It also needs a lot of work.  Most of it is relatively stuff that we could do - paint, new tile flooring in bathrooms, replacing the little transitional bits that are supposed to separate the floors of two different rooms.  Who takes those out, I ask you?  Additionally, whoever did the painting did not appear to fully appreciate the wonder that is painters' tape so there's a lot of paint bleeding.  But that's OK because the colors in most of the rooms are so ugly that we would want to repaint them pronto.  Bright peach!  Yellow!  Our neutral, natural color-loving selves cringed just a little.  Some of the ceilings have that funky crow's feet texturing to them that is kind of dated (and glossy - a ceiling should not be glossy).

The price is right; it's not a stretch for us.  The location is pretty good; Marshall is a cute little town (and we do mean little).  In terms of resale, it's also a desirable location, although admittedly this is the nicest house on the street so there's probably a limit to resale value.  So we hemmed and hawed and then last night sometime after midnight emailed our realtor to say we'd like to put in an offer.  The offer went in earlier this evening, although it was nearly derailed because a certain bank who will remain unnamed (for now) failed at getting a letter of pre-approval to us in timely fashion.  We got it eventually, but not without some minor panic.  Which is not fun, I might add, on nearly zero sleep because we (mostly N) were up nearly all night thinking about this.

Ours is not the only offer.  However, we hope that our willingness to offer a 20% down payment will tip the scales our way in the bank's eyes.  They will probably get more offers over the weekend (wince) but there is nothing we can do now but wait.

And try not to think about it.

Yeah, like that's going to work.