We first saw the listing for this house in March. And we were like, "yeah, right. That is so out of our league." We actually weren't even looking yet and hadn't gotten our house on the market but our realtor was still sending us info about houses that would consider a land contract. Our plan b (or plan c, depending on the day) was to rent our old house and buy a house on a land contract if we couldn't sell our house. This was something we had been thinking about for two years since the last time we tried to sell our house so our realtor kept us in the loop for land contract possibilities. This one, however, was a bit out of our price range. So we scoffed at the listing and said we wouldn't want it even if we could afford it because it needed to be redecorated and had lots of pink on the inside. Yes, I realize that I was grasping at straws, looking for negatives.
Fast forward about 6 weeks - we have a full offer on our house after the 3rd showing. It was crazy fast. Our realtor hadn't even put the updated pictures on the website - and I worked hard at getting those pictures! But that is not something you complain about when you have a full price offer after only being on the market for 10 days. We started calling banks to get pre-approved and looking at houses. There was some questions about getting financing because of some previous rental properties we had purchased so we decided to look at this house in case a land contract was still our only option, although we still didn't think we could afford it.
We walked through it and loved the floor plan. Loved the space. Didn't love the pink. Didn't know if we'd love a master bedroom on the 2nd floor. But overall, loved the house. Which made it really hard when we looked at other houses that were priced a little lower. There was always something wrong with those houses - needed too much work (we had done enough projects already, thank you very much), driveway was too steep or too small, yard was too small, subdivision was too closed in, rooms felt small. It was hard to complain about those houses because they were all bigger than our current house but we had this feeling that we didn't want to be doing this again in 5 years - we wanted it to be permanent this time. We didn't want to settle for okay. We wanted to find something that felt like home.
Then, we found out the sellers lowered the price on this house. And we got financing. And we crunched some numbers. And thought, maybe, it would work. We negotiated and agreed on a price. The inspection went well. The timing was just about perfect - we had to be out of our house by July 1 - the sellers were already out of this house but needed to move a few things yet. They graciously agreed to let us move in if we didn't mind their things being here for a couple days. And before I knew it, I was living in my dream house.
My kids have friends over now and it doesn't feel like they're taking over the house. It's not so big that we lose each other - we're still mostly together in the kitchen or family room in the evenings. But it's big enough to have family and friends over and not feel like we're sitting on top of each other. It has everything on my list that I was looking for and then some. I even like having a master bedroom on the 2nd floor. It's perfect.
