Innocent Ramblings of a So-Called Writer

Exciting and Adventurous or Batshit Crazy?

So, in case you missed it, the hubs and I have had our house on the market since August of 2008. That means we are hurtling towards the “one year” mark at an infuriating pace, and despite the fact that we’ve had a more than healthy number of showings, and 100% positive feedback about our house, our upgrades, our style choices, etc… we’ve had exactly ZERO offers.  Combine that 0.00 percent batting average with the fact that we’ve also come down off of our initial listing price by over $18k and you can pretty much imagine how heinous we are feeling… particularly on days like today when we hosted an open house where precisely no one showed up.  Phrases like “soul crushing” and “dream stabbing” are becoming ever more frequent, and the time that the hubs has to spend taking his frustrations out on the tools in his garage in order to stop himself from wanting to throw things around the house is growing longer with every week that goes by.

There is, however, one activity which never fails to take our minds off of this masochistic nightmare. (No, not that. Ew my parents read this blog).  The panacea for our house-selling woes?  Going out to look at other houses.  Nothing gives us more joy than climbing into our realtor’s Kia minivan and spending six hours traipsing through other people’s houses.  We’ve fallen head over heels for at least five houses since we embarked on this fools errand last fall. We thought, “Hey how fun would it be to try and buy a house while prices are falling? Ours can’t be that hard to sell, right?”  We were half right, there. It is TONS of fun to look at houses you could never afford in a normal market and realize that you could scoop them up for a FRICKIN’ STEAL right now. Crunching the numbers can actually induce an endorphin high - especially when you start to drool over what the house will be worth when the market pops back up.   We know we are young, relatively unhindered, and we have the time and the flexibility to wait out the market and make good on a smart investment that we make in the here now. We have a fabulous realtor, a great loan guy, a financial advisor in the wings, and a healthy bit of down payment equity to draw out of our current house.

Oh, right. Our current house. F!  And thus we plunge once more down the painful spiral - it’s down at the end of that spiral where ideas like “Let’s go egg the house two streets down that just sold!” start to sound genius. (We of course come to our senses and realize that it would be silly to egg the house NOW. We should wait until the people that came to our house said “Oh we love yours the most!” and then went down the street and bought the more expensive one with less upgrades because it had a “formal living room space” actually move in later this summer. Then we will egg the shit out of it. Much better plan.)

But then we go out looking again. And we find more houses to love. A country style ranch on two acres, a cozy cottage two minutes from the school where the hubs teaches, a custom built castle with subway tile backsplash in the kitchen, a rustic little blue house with a wrap around porch that has access to a nearby park, and a house so perfect we nicknamed it “Forever House”, because had we moved there, we would have stayed put forever. All of these domiciles have claimed our heart and occupied countless hours of daydreaming and fanciful planning. And every single one of them has been bought by someone else who was lucky enough to sell their house or not have a house to sell in the first place.  Did I mention how often we use the phrase “soul crushing” ?

Our latest crush is on a 1930’s historical home in Monroe, NC, a small town outside of Charlotte that boomed as a railroad town in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s full of charming Victorians, stately Colonials, and rustic bungalows. It’s precious, and this house sits on Franklin Street, the most coveted address in the town.   To buy this house would be tantamount to buying a whole new lifestyle - one built around hunting for antique doorknobs and period-appropriate light-fixtures. One where talking to a contractor six times a day would be considered normal, and where a 45 minute drive to work would be acceptable. In other words, it might be the craziest, stupidest, most foolhardy idea we’ve had  yet (second only, perhaps, to putting our house on the market to begin with).  But maybe not.

Maybe this is the only time in our lives we are young enough and passionate enough and obsessed enough with HGTV to really pull off a renovation project like this.  Maybe this will be an adventure of our early married years that we look back on with a sense of wistful romanticism. “Remember when we fixed up that historic home?”  Maybe our kids will love their memories of growing up in a cool, historic home (with a kick ass kitchen complete with granite island the size of a boat, pot drawers, subway tile backsplash and wine fridge) and they’ll think it’s strange when they go to visit other kids houses that don’t have 3,500 rambling square feet of original hardwoods and four fireplaces.  Maybe this is the house that we’ll love so much that we hang a watercolor painting of it in every house we own after it.  Who knows? All we know is that this last year of looking at new houses and praying fervently that we can sell our own has been the most terrible, wonderful, excruciatingly fun time we’ve ever had.