And now, for the rest of the story . . .
The first part of this saga ended with finding a good apartment prospect. After not so much deliberation, I wanted to submit the rental application, along with a deposit to hold the place while they processed our application, and be done with this agonizingly long and drawn out apartment/house hunt.
Matthew felt we’d put the time and energy into looking at houses for sale and wanted to make an offer on a FSBO house we’d looked at a couple of times. I wasn’t excited about the place, but I agreed to make a low offer.
So last Friday morning, I biked over to drop off our rental application and earnest money and Matthew made some phone calls that ended with making a verbal offer on the house. Because why have just one place to live when you could have a house AND an apartment?
Anyway, the FSBO was an estate house, and since our offer was lower than their asking price, they had to take it to probate.
Having done all we could, we headed out to a local winery for a relaxing stressful afternoon. In the middle of our wine tasting, the trustee of the estate called back and engaged Matthew in an exceedingly long conversation, the bottom line of which was, he would take our offer before the probate judge but would not argue for it, but if we increased our offer by $5k (still $15k below their asking price), he would argue for it.
Hot, tired, annoyed that Matthew was spending most of our winery trip on the phone, and frustrated with (and physically uncomfortable because of) a fussy, refusing-to-nurse baby, I had no desire to enter into negotiations or increase our offer on a house that I wasn’t all that excited about. So we said they could take or leave our initial offer, and they later called back to say, “no deal.”
With our new lease start-date still a few weeks away, we went ahead and pulled out the boxes and packing tape over the weekend, making an impressive amount of progress in little spurts here and there. We started to discuss how we would arrange things in the new apartment.
And then on Tuesday afternoon, the FSBO guy calls Matthew and says they’ve reversed course and will take our offer, if we’re still offering. For some reason, I’d kind-of expected this and was not terribly surprised.
After a bit of discussion that evening, we ultimately decided that this was not the house for us, even at our original offer price, and Matthew informed the owners of our final decision.
So. Packing continues and we’ve scheduled movers. In a few weeks, our almost-year-long experiment in living as a family of three in a one-bedroom apartment will come to an end, and I am ready!
Related posts:
T minus two months
Moving day
Two’s company
We ain’t goin’ nowhere
Am I asking too much?
Her Green Life 
Ugh house hunting can be so stressful and emotional. You will find the right place eventually though. It took us two years 🙂
OY! It took about a year for me to find the right house. Buying a house is such a massive commitment that you really don’t want to settle for a place that you feel “meh” about. I also think that passing on the property that would have required a huge construction project was a wise decision!
It also sounds like what you need right now is something to make your life easier, and trust me, while I still believe that buying my house was one of the best decisions I ever made, being a first time homeowner is NOT easy! It’s a big leap from calling the landlord when there’s a problem to figuring out how to deal with it yourself. And it sounds to me like you’ve got your hands full at the moment. I personally can’t imagine trying to juggle all of the craziness of moving into a new home with having a baby to care for.
I also don’t think that everybody needs to be a homeowner. For some people renting is a really good option. And we all know that the housing market has been anything but stable in the past few years!
So maybe all this is just the universe telling you that now isn’t the right time.
Despite all the “it’s a great time to buy” hype, it’s only a great time if we find the right place at a price we think we could resell it fairly easily if for some reason we needed to move sooner rather than later.
I’m pretty sure that buying is in our future. With the right property and the right location (walkable, accessible to transit/activities/necessities, and bikeable), I could see being a life-time renter (when I was a kid, I always assumed that bring an adult meant owning a house), but there’s the whole land-to-garden factor. For any type of larger-scale gardening endeavor, having it right outside your door is a huge plus.