The best laid plans....House Hunting Day #4

We had a very nice morning today. We decided this morning to put an offer on the foreclosure house, so I called our agent and we set up a meeting for 1:00 at the house. We spent the rest of the morning driving around, familiarizing ourselves with the area and the shopping centers and such. I know Conference was going on, but there is no way we would've been able to concentrate on it with Sean in the room, so we decided to go out instead. Sean did get a good nap in the car as we were driving around, which was nice. We were a little early for our meeting with our agent, so we went to the house, and put Sean in the stroller and walked around the neighborhood. The few people we ran across were very nice, and there is a very small playground only a few houses down from the house we're looking at. Our agent asked her son to come along, he does a variety of things like landscaping, remodeling and finishing houses, that sort of thing. He came to look at the basement so we could bounce ideas off him about finishing it and get a rough estimate for how much it would cost. We talked to him, got some good ideas, then started talking to Terri about what kind of offer we would put down. Now here's the bad news. The listing agent sent Terri a message that she was getting another offer on the house today. So now we're not so sure that we can get the house. We're still going to put in an offer, but it will be higher than we'd first planned to offer, without asking for closing costs, like we'd planned to ask for before. All along we've siad that we have lots of options, it's a buyer's market, we can wait for a good deal, blah, blah, blah, but once we made the decision to offer on this one, I started thinking of it as our house, and thinking about what I was going to put where, and having friends over to barbeque in the fire pit, etc. So to think that we might not get it was very disappointing. Our offer will go in first thing Monday morning, but we won't hear if we got it until we're already home on Tuesday. So suddenly we're scrambling for a backup plan. We ended up going to look at the new construction again, and we even toured an already finished home priced at $283K. It was absolutely beautiful, but there's no way. The guy out there said it was a bare bones home that a buyer had put together--meaning he was on a budget and didn't add many extras to the home--and then that sale fell through. So they had this customized, finished home, with no buyer. He thought we could maybe offer $260 for it, since the builder was eager to sell, and worried about selling that one, but even at that, it's out of our price range. It was an awfully nice home, though. But, we're walking away from that option. So then we came back to our room to look at our other top choices and see what other backup options we have. We decided not to go for the artsy house. There is another house that is almost as close to the base as the foreclosure home, and has a similar layout with unfinished basement, but it is twelve years older, and it is $8K more. We liked that one well enough, so it could be a good backup. Then I found a new house just listed today that is just a couple streets away from the foreclosure house, that looks very nearly identical--on paper anyway. It's got the same number of rooms and square footage and basement space, built in the same year, probably by the same builder. It's $10K more. We could go for that as a backup, and ask the seller to pay the closing costs (about $6K), which we didn't ask for on the foreclosure house, and it would come out to be close to the same price. We're going to go look at it on Monday at any rate, and see if it is as good as it sounds. Since it was listed today, it's not likely to get another offer this week (unless it's the other couple offering on the same house we want). So we're making contingency plans, and will just have to go from there.

The good news of the day is that our house in Ohio is getting its third showing Monday morning from 9:00-10:00. Ha. I would never have said yes to that time if we were at home, but as it is, they can come on it.