1 patient realtor
8 months.
4 builders
a bazillion houses looked at either online or in person
and much discouragement leads to this:
WE ARE UNDER CONTRACT FOR A HOUSE!!!
We had become very discouraged. We had found countless houses that would have been perfect but, oh, wait - how many steps are on the front porch? Crap. Who else do you know that counts the steps of the front porch or looks at the grade of the lawn or the bricks to try to determine how many steps from the garage to the house? And if we make it to "might be feasible", who else do you know that looks at the tiles in the bathroom trying to calculate if there is enough turn around space for a wheelchair?
Me. I do that. I did that a lot. Like, a LOT, A lot.
Oh, and if it did look good, don't think about it too long because within 24 hours, it would be contingent or sometimes SOLD!
One beautiful day, I turned to Realtor - that bastion of hope and lies- and happened to see a drawing for a house in a neighborhood we liked. Hmmm. It was a ranch. It was in our (new) price range and it was being built. The floor plan looked good . . . perhaps if we got in now, we could make some changes and it would work?
Contact patient realtor.
House is a presale- boo.
Builder says - but hey, what do you think about this lot and plan? And tell me what you need.
Can you hear the angels singing? 'Cause it was a 4th of July Boston concert!
And yet, we were very apprehensive because of the previous 8 months.
The previous 8 months consisted of looking at houses that might work but all had remodeling work we needed to do. One had a sunken floor in the living room that was the center of the house - and the bathrooms were way too small. Another that really looked promising - bathroom looked great, we had a solution for entry, there were 4 bedrooms and 3 baths, acre, well, internet but the door to the bathroom was 24 inches. And the hallways were tight. Sigh.
Then there were the builders we met - OH. MY. WORD. One told us that he "didn't do these houses" and he "knew what we wanted and would give us what we wanted". It was odd. Very odd. And we decided not to waste Jarrad's time with first visits anymore. The 2nd was way over the budget that we said we had. He also didn't give us any of the things that we asked for. Which was odd because this was a neighborhood that boasted "granite counter tops", "wood flooring", "custom cabinets" so why were we getting builder grade, linoleum, builder grade cabinets? At a much higher price per square foot then other houses? They knew what we wanted and how much we had before we ever met too. Yeah, still annoyed by that waste of time. The 3rd was nice. He just didn't have anything for us.
And we became discouraged. We did some soul searching, some yelling, some crying. We reconsidered our budget. We made some compromises in what we wanted (read - cut things out) for what we needed. We talked about what we were afraid of and made a "prayer" board. A vision board, if you will, of things to pray for.
Which brings us to builder #4.
With any luck, we will close in December, our current house will sell in a timely fashion. Fingers crossed and prayers said.
