Homestead Search // Offer #1

When I started this blog allllll the way back in March (so, a whopping two months ago), I didn’t dream that we’d actually be searching for any homestead this year other than the one we’re living on right now in the suburbs.

Well, as we’ve all learned over the past two months, apparently a LOT can change in that short amount of time.

As I detailed in another post, the company my husband works for is moving three hours’ south of here. While we haven’t fully committed to moving down with them, we’re definitely looking into it as land is a bit cheaper down there, and as searching for a job under these conditions really isn’t palatable.

This week, we took a big step in that direction—we drove down to look at some houses, and we actually made an offer on the final one we walked through.

Let me back up a bit though.

Ever since we first heard rumblings of a possible company move, we started searching the real estate market in that county. What we saw initially was kind of exciting—definitely lower house prices than here, and since it’s much more of a rural location, many of the properties came with at least a quarter to half-acre, which is the minimum amount of land that we’re searching for.

As for the houses themselves, though, we weren’t coming across anything that really excited us or that made us really want to take a chance on the area. The fact is, we love the place that we live in now, and moving is always stressful.

But then, last weekend, I saw it—a listing that immediately grabbed at my heart (especially when I saw the price) that was for the most immaculately cared-for old house that was build in 1890, with over a dozen fruit trees, a huge kitchen garden, an original stone chimney, and a massive outbuilding that they were using as both garage and workshop. I was immediately in love with the built-in bookshelves, the original molding, and the most perfect little office space looking out a bay window at the garden, and Matt definitely liked it enough to go have a look. (And, in case you think that we’re crazy, the major fixtures of the home had been updated, like the plumbing, heating, air conditioning, etc.)

Then our realtor (Rob Owens of White Pine Realty, who is awesome) called on it and delivered the bad news–within just a couple days of being listed, it already had multiple offers, and if we wanted to see it, we’d have to go down immediately to both see it and then to make an offer.

So Matt took Friday off, and we all drove down (along with my mom and my stepdad, who is from that area) to go have a look.

And we ALL fell in love with it. (Or I should say, everyone else did—I had been sold from the get-go.) Everything felt right about it—the house just had the best feeling, and I had felt nothing but positive vibes since I first laid eyes on the listing photo. It felt much like the feeling we’d had right before making an offer on our current house—like we should be thinking we’re crazy to make such a huge decision after a 30-minute tour of a house, but that when your gut tells you it’s good, you go with it anyway.

So we sat down–at the kitchen table of the very house!—to write up our offer, right then and there.

Because we’d have to make our offer contingent on our own home selling, we knew that we’d have to put in a strong bid, so we offered $10K more than asking as well as offered to cover all our own closing costs. To stretch our chances further, we wrote a letter about why we wanted the home and included a photo of our family. We were able to pull together our offer before Rob had to jet off to another showing, and I was even able to get a hold of our mortgage loan officer after business hours were over, and she emailed over the necessary preapproval papers right away. It was all falling into place, and just in the nick of time.

And then we waited.

Thankfully, we didn’t have to wait too long, as we had put in our offer a mere 3 hours before they were scheduled to make a final decision.

So, as Matt and I were in our back garden doing a walkabout and watering our raised beds, we got the call from Rob.

And we didn’t get the house.

While we weren’t totally shocked (the winning bid had been even higher than ours), we WERE (and are) definitely disappointed. Everything had felt so perfect about it, and I’ll admit that I’ve been feeling deflated ever since, at least when it comes to looking at other options.

But we know things will work out somehow.

Not gonna lie, though—it would take a pretty amazing house and deal to compete with the one we just tried to get!

But we carry on.