House Hunted
by Scott Hardie on October 22, 2016
I'm not superstitious, or I wouldn't say this until the closing next month: Kelly and I are buying a house. It's a great house, too, with a guest bedroom and a pool, and the neighbor training horses in the back yard every day, and plenty of room for just about whatever we'd want to do with it, at a lower price than similar houses around here. It's not a hundred percent perfect but damn if it ain't close.
I feel like the luckiest person in the world when good fortune like this comes into my life. All I can do is try to be grateful for it. Kelly and I have waited too long to own a house (we should have done it years ago in preparation for retirement), but once we decided to go for it this fall, the process was surprisingly fast and smooth. One weekend we met with a friend of mine who's a realtor, the next weekend we looked at a ton of houses, and the third weekend we looked at this house and made an offer on it. Our offer was accepted the very next day, and since then it has been a flurry of paperwork and errands and decisions. We're now finally entering a lull in the process where we wait a few weeks for the bank to process the loan, but if we close as expected on November 21, I'm sure there will be a few more crazy weeks of moving and getting settled. With luck, we'll be in before Kelly's family visits for Christmas (how nice it will be to have a fireplace on that day), but otherwise it'll be January at the latest. Words are insufficient to express how excited and gratified we are about all of this.
Looking back on the process, I can see that we had certain advantages that allowed us to buy a house in two weeks. First, we knew our needs by spelling them out and identifying which were most important to us. Second, we knew our limits, by taking the realtor's advice and getting pre-approved for a loan first so that we didn't waste our time looking at houses beyond our reach, and also knowing that our current lease ends January 31 so we had to make an offer within the first 4-6 weeks in order to be out in time. Third, we (especially Kelly) searched online and knew the houses in the area. There really weren't that many houses matching our needs and wants in our price range, and several were taken already by the time we reached them, so we knew to act immediately when we found one available. We're in a dance now where the bank says jump and we ask how high, dropping everything to get them whatever financial documents they need to process the loan and give us the green light to close, but it's quieting down.
A few things could still go wrong and spoil this purchase, but they're getting more unlikely by the day, so here's hoping that I'll get to write a follow-up post in a couple of months describing how we're all settled in. Considering that I canceled today's GooCon to make this house purchase happen, I thought it was a good idea to share our progress. Thanks again for understanding about that.
Four Replies to House Hunted
Lori Lancaster | October 31, 2016
[hidden by author request]
Scott Hardie | November 6, 2016
Thank you both! Pools are somewhat common here of course, but i was surprised at how many houses have fireplaces. This is Florida, people. The coldest night of a given winter is maybe 50 degrees. Neither Kelly nor I wanted a fireplace, but maybe 75% of the houses that we looked at had a fireplace, so we resigned ourselves to being stuck with one. We might dismantle it to create space for furniture, but that's a low priority.
Scott Hardie | November 25, 2016
The closing went smoothly, and we are thrilled to be homeowners! Now we get to deal with a different headache, the move. We've been coordinating with lots of businesses (utilities and movers and exterminators and so on) and starting to pack, and trying not to let a few social obligations like a family Thanksgiving dinner slow us down too much. I don't expect to have much time for Funeratic until after our move on Friday December 9, and we'll be entertaining family guests for a week around Christmas, but I'm still lurking and I plan to blog about it all when things get back to normal. Until then, happy Thanksgiving today and happy bargain hunting tomorrow and a happy few weeks thereafter. :-)
Logical Operator
The creator of Funeratic, Scott Hardie, blogs about running this site, losing weight, and other passions including his wife Kelly, his friends, movies, gaming, and Florida. Read more »
Wests Take Southwest to Southeast
As Steve West mentioned, he and Brenda recently visited Sarasota for a week of fun. In advance, we rented an AirBNB (cat allergies prevented staying at my place) and kicked around some ideas for what to do, but we were concerned about unpredictable fatigue and other medical complications and knew that we had to take it one day at a time. The trip had a bumpy start, with Kelly taken by ambulance to the ER the night before (she recovered quickly) and a difficult Southwest flight and Uber pickup for the Wests, but that all quickly felt like it was behind us as soon as the fun began. Go »Mars Needs Kitties
Thanks to Lori for sending me this: That gets me thinking: Do you think if people hadn't had the idea for crop circles until a decade later that the fad would have even happened? In this decade we have the tools on personal computers to fake images like this with photo-perfect results, and hoaxers could just distribute photos with the click of a mouse. Photos have been doctored for decades, of course, but now your grandma can do it, you know? Go »Good Company and Busy Nights
Highlights from my last two weeks, in no particular order: - Miah Poisson, his fiancée Ines, and her friend Denise have always wanted to see The X Files, and it just so happens I have the complete series on DVD. We've started getting together every Monday night to watch a couple of episodes and eat sandwiches. I'm taking the opportunity to do something I wanted to do the first time I watched the series, which is keep a kill-count. Go »The Little Ship
Our cat Sweetie Pie passed away in her sleep on Thursday night after a very long illness. We don't know how old she was -- she was my mother's cat before mine, and my grandmother's cat before that, and belonged to some other lady in my grandmother's nursing home before then. We have that stranger to thank for giving her the old-fashioned name, but it was appropriate: Sweetie Pie was a friendly cat, who was happy when company came over (especially if they fed her treats!) Go »Shoulda Seen It Coming
The news that Princeton's infamous ESP research lab is soon to close (link) is both heartening and a little disappointing. On one hand, if there's anything at all to ESP, then skeptics should have no objection to private donations funding some bonafide scientific research into it – no harm done except for a hint of legitimacy. On the other hand, this lab was a black bruise for Princeton and its "findings" were routinely debunked, and a facility investigating exceptional claims must have exceptional adherence to scientific standards. Go »
Denise Sawicki | October 25, 2016
Looks great! Congrats! There aren't too many houses with pools around here, I think I've seen about 2 in Fargo (and yes we have summer haha)