For one thing, I thought we were done with the forced home evacuations... wrong! When I heard the William Tell Overture on Saturday, I happily told the woman on the other end of the phone that we'd sold our house, so no more showings! She patiently explained that it was still available for showings, since the house inspection hadn't occurred yet, and the offer was contingent on the inspection. Oh...ok. So we ended up having 2 showings on Sunday... where were these people a month ago??? Although for the very first time I said no to a showing when they requested one right smack in the middle of Zach's nap - boy did that feel good! Anyway, then we had to get out again Monday for the inspection; Koskie gets all excited that he gets to come along, then ends up waiting in the car, this time while we went to a music class. Poor pooch.
On to the house-hunting part of this wonderful process. While it is definitely better than the selling process, it's been... interesting. Our first time out, we saw 10 houses, while our friends Jenny and Kyle watched Zach - thank you thank you! And out of those 10, 8 were in foreclosure or "short sale". Which means we went through empty and not maintained houses, most of which had been stripped of things like the cabinet hardware, appliances, and in one case - shower doors! It was rather depressing, especially since most of those houses clearly had kids living in them. I'm a softie, what can I say; I kept imagining those poor kids thrown out of their homes. It made all the gloom and doom you hear about on the news seem a little more real, I guess.
Our second time out, last night, was better in that most of the houses were not foreclosures - it was nice to look at houses with furniture! But we had Zach with us, and while he did pretty well, he was not a fan of the in and out of the car repetition. The highlight for him was probably the two houses that had cats; he got to run after the cats hollering "meow".
Let me try to summarize the extremes that exist in this process... While we were trying to sell our house, we did things to "stage" it, just a few examples include putting extra stuff in storage, painting, giving a bare lightbulb a light fixture, and eventually - having the exterior of our house painted. When we walked through a foreclosed house yesterday, they had "staged" the house with... a dead goose on the deck. No, I'm not kidding. We're not sure if it came with the house or not, but it wasn't much of an incentive to buy. Painted exterior... dead goose. Huh.
In summary, we have looked at 18 houses so far, and I think there are 2 in contention. We've seen a lot of houses that are close to what we want, but there's always something - yard is too small, basement isn't a walk-out, or the layout is just wrong. So we're back on the hunt tonight. Another big THANK YOU to the Bergums for watching Zach tonight so we can crank through as many houses as possible!
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