Finding a new house

In my last post I talked about the purposes for this blog. I wanted to share the story of finding the home we are purchasing.

 

What makes this an interesting story is that we are actually trading houses! The folks we are buying our new house from, are buying our old house from us. It's a very interesting story, but let me start at the beginning.

In March, Deena and I were back in Tri-Cities, WA for a trip home. We have been living in Boston for the last year, but that is a different story. You can read her blog at East-Cost-Living to learn more about our adventures in Boston. While we were home we discussed again the possibilities of selling our house. We have lived in the house for 11 years, and although it has been great, the needs of our family have outgrown the house. We decided to go looking for new houses. The story is full of strange coincidences, which at the point I will consider blessings as it has become more and more clear to us that this is the place we should live.

 

Deena being the organized person that she is (sometimes I refer to it as neurotic) had compiled a list, well…actually a binder full of printouts for all of the houses we had researched ahead of time. Our goal was to start at one side of town, and view externally as many homes as we could that day, finish up the next day, and then call our realtor and see some houses. We started on the East side of Kennewick. Anyone who knows me knows I have always preferred the West side. My parents live in Rancho Reata, I grew up there, Deena's parents live in Badger Canyon, and I have always preferred that area. Nevertheless, we found some attractive homes in East Kennewick, so they were on the list. As we are driving down Spruce we see a sign for a 5-bedroom house with a pool. Great! That must be the one…although I don't remember it having a pool on the listing. The gate is open, so we drive in and have a look around. To make a long story short, we love the house, and cannot believe how great it is for the price. As we leave, we drive down the road a bit more, and find the house we are supposed to see. Hummm…not quite as nice. We continue to work through the list, driving by and reviewing houses, crossing some off the list, marking others as needing to be seen with our agent.

 

Finally we are ready to see houses. We decide to see the house on Spruce first. It is more expensive then we had originally planned, however the features associated with the property are attractive enough that it's worth looking at. We meet with the agent and walk through the house. We are blown away. Part of me didn't want to get too excited, but this house seemed to have everything we needed. Is it too much to ask for the first house to be the right one?

 

After getting our fill of the house we continued our day of seeing houses. When it was all said and done, we had driven by 40+ homes, and walked through 20+. The reality was we couldn't get the first one out of our mind. Everything else we saw was compared to that house. There was only one logical choice. Buy that house.