Three months into the house hunting process, and two months into the house selling process, and I AM SO DONE WITH THIS SHIT.
I’m getting impatient. (Obviously.) We are having very little luck, and it is tremendously frustrating.
At the very beginning of this month, we put in an offer on a house we loved only to have it rejected because we were unwilling to remove our contingency. And, well, come to find out, that was a smart decision on our part, because have we sold our current place? No, we haven’t.
In fact, we have not had a single showing in nearly three weeks. Not good. When we first put our place on the market, we were doing well for the first 5 weeks or so–at least one showing a week, and we had an open house as well. We received great feedback from people, but no one willing to put an actual offer on the table. Now, we’re feeling a bit of pressure from our realtor to lower our asking price. Although we’re not necessarily against that, we are disagreeing over how much. We’d like to lower it about 2.5%, and she would like to lower it about 4-5%. As a result of our disagreement, we haven’t lowered it at all.
Honestly, we’re not sure what to do. We are heading into April, and supposedly the market is supposed to pick up. Do we lower the price to make our listing appear “fresh” and to try to attract more buyers? Or do we hold tight, assuming that the right buyer will come along now that “the season” for real estate is upon us?
There’s also part of us that doesn’t even care if we can’t sell our place right now because, well, it’s not like we have a place to go. We don’t have a new house to move into, so what’s the rush? Of course, the other side of that argument is that if the right house for us does pop up onto the market, we would be in much better shape to make an “attractive” offer on it if we were already under contract on our current place.
This is such a balancing act and a waiting game. I hate it.
Last weekend, we looked at a house that we weren’t expecting to like that much. It needed A LOT of work, and it was evident in the pictures. Even more evident as we walked through it. It was a house built in the 1960s, and I’m not kidding when I say that the sellers have lived in the house and HAVE NOT UPDATED A SINGLE THING. Kitchen? Needed to be gutted. Bathrooms? Needed to be gutted. All interior and exterior doors needed replacing. It needed new carpeting in the family room, stairs, and upstairs hallway. The entire house needed to be freshly painted. In other words, this was so totally the opposite of what we said we wanted when we set out on our house hunt.
But, you know, somehow, we fell in love with it. We fell in love with the idea of being able to choose everything according to our taste. Being able to make everything fresh and bright and brand new. Being able to buy more house for the money. We weren’t CRAZY in love with the place, because we knew it was going to cost a lot of money to do all of these things. But we were seriously considering our options. We were researching costs for renovations and materials we would need. We figured if we could get the house for a good price (which, by our definition, was a good chunk below asking price), it would be worth buying. So, we had an appointment to return to the house with our parents to get their opinions.
And just 10 minutes before I was supposed to leave work to go to the appointment, our realtor called and said that the sellers of the house were dealing with an offer they had received earlier that afternoon. That the offer was reasonable and that the sellers were working with it.
We weren’t willing to compete with someone else for the house. We had a price that we were willing to pay for it, and we knew that we would have to be willing to pay more. And we weren’t.
So we let the house go.
And now we are back at square one. Again.
Unfortunately, there has not been a single new listing (meeting our criteria) that has popped up this week. Isn’t the market supposed to be picking up? That’s what everyone keeps telling us, but we have yet to see this big “boom” in listings.
Believe me, we are waiting.
Impatiently.
We’ve never been huge movie watchers, but we see most of the “hit” stuff… once it’s a rental, that is. We very rarely go to the theater. In fact, I think the last movie we saw at the theater was on 1/1/10 (it was Sherlock Holmes). So, yeah, it’s been a while. I don’t know–I guess we would rather curl up on our own couch under some blankets with glasses of wine or bottles of beer, with snacks readily available in our kitchen cupboards. That’s just how we roll. And it also saves us mucho dinero, so {shrug} WIN-WIN.
A few years ago, we had Blockbuster Online for several months, but we came to realize that we normally didn’t watch enough movies to make the subscription worth having, so we cancelled it. We have a Blockbuster within walking distance of our house, so it was never an issue. In the mood for a movie? We’d go pick one up. In the spring/summer/fall, when the weather was favorable, it was especially nice because we’d actually walk over there. We would even take Tessa with us, and the Blockbuster employees were always cool about us bringing her inside with us (we carried her, of course).
Back around Christmas time, I really wanted to watch Season 1 of Modern Family so I could catch up. Unfortunately, our local Blockbuster stores didn’t carry it (why? I have no idea), but we discovered that if we signed up for a free trial of Netflix, we could rent it through there. So we did, but we soon let our trial expire, again thinking that we don’t watch enough movies to make it worth it.
Oddly enough, a few weeks later, we were driving by our Blockbuster when we saw a huge banner hanging across the front: STORE CLOSING.
Well, damn.
After a few days of debate, we went ahead and signed up for Netflix. Now, we have a subscription and we are doing everything we can to watch more movies. Of course, having the instant streaming is pretty awesome, though I do wish they had more of a selection available (especially more recent stuff). We’re in our first month of the subscription and we have already watched enough movies to compensate for the fee. And although we have plenty of things in our Bluray queue, I would love to have recommendations for things to put in our instant queue. Older stuff that maybe we haven’t seen or should see again.
We’ve browsed, but for those of you who have Netflix, what have been your favorite instant movies? Anything obscure that ended up being good? Any old movies that you’ve rediscovered?
And while we’re at it, let’s just give recommendations for recent movies as well. What have you seen? What have you loved?
Annnnnd… GO! :)
At a family dinner this past weekend, Hunter sure put on a show. The kid had all of these special dance moves, knew exactly when certain parts were coming in the song, and even ended with a spectacular display of jazz hands. So, we did what any family would do–
We made him do it three times in a row.
His first rendition was by far the best one, and sadly, we didn’t capture it on camera. But all three versions were some form of HILARIOUS.
One day last week, I picked up Nora from daycare, and as I was putting her into her car seat, she started blowing raspberries at me. I laughed and said, “Whoa! That’s new!” Our daycare provider told me that she had picked it up from Amelia, her daycare buddy (who is just two weeks younger than Nora). She said they were blowing raspberries at each other. How cute is that?
Now, she does it all the time, at random times. We try to get her to do it on demand but it rarely happens. She usually reserves it for 1) other kids and 2) Tessa. She loves to coo and blow raspberries at Tessa.
I happened to catch a couple seconds of her on video. I know they’re not “real” raspberries–with the tongue sticking out–but it’s still hilarious. Except when she does it with food in her mouth. That’s just messy.
About
I'm Heather. I'm 33 and have been married to Michael for seven years. Together, we have two beautiful little girls we love more than anything, and a miniature dachshund who drives us crazy. I'm a full-time working mom who has very little time for my own "stuff" these days, like home improvement, cooking/baking, cake decorating, and photography. Despite the team not making the playoffs since 1999, I'm STILL a Buffalo Bills fan, which I think speaks to my loyalty AND sense of humor. I can't wait to pick up the pace with travel again some day... you know, when we're done being ruled by tiny fists. Welcome to my blog.
