Sudden
The other day I mentioned that there was a town house a couple blocks from my current apartment that I really liked the look of from outside.
This morning I found out that the sellers are expecting a bid on it tomorrow. I finally got ahold of the real estate agent Arthur recommended, and he arranged to meet me at the place an hour and a half later. He opened it up and we looked around.
Two medium-large upstairs bedrooms, each with a bathroom attached. (Most condos in my price range that claim "two bedrooms" around here seem to have one "loft bedroom," featuring no privacy at all.) On the high end of the square-footage range for my price range. A medium-large living room/dining room, with a small fireplace. A smallish kitchen, with an opening in one wall leading to the dining room area, and a stone-surfaced shelf in that opening to match the stone-surfaced fireplace. A downstairs half-bath (toilet and sink, no shower). (Yes, you read that right: two bedrooms, two and a half bathrooms.) Lots of closet space, and a fair bit of wall space for bookshelves. A nice "greenhouse window" over the sink. Space and hookups for a stacked washer/dryer unit. A small one-car garage built in. Shares only one wall with a neighboring unit. Part of a small complex of five units, with a little cul-de-sac shared driveway. Copious street parking.
But that's not all: it also has a deck out back, with a nice porch swing (built by the previous owner), and a medium-sized back yard, with one section cyclone-fenced off to be a dog run.
It's not perfect. For example, it needs some maintenance: some of the doors stick, the bedroom closet doors are a little run-down, at least one of the carpets needs to be replaced, the wooden kitchen floor has some cosmetic damage and probably needs to be resurfaced or something.
And the kitchen's a little small (but not tiny, and I don't cook most of the time anyway), and the living room is a little narrow (I specifically wanted a squarer living room than I've got), and the bedrooms aren't huge (but they're decent-sized). I didn't want a place that needed work, because I'm lazy and hate home improvement stuff, and I didn't want a place with a yard, because it tends to cost more and I would rarely if ever use it, and I don't want to have to maintain it (like mowing the lawn). But the yard is so nice! And the work needed is cosmetic and could be done gradually over time (and, the agent says, wouldn't cost much); mostly it's no worse than most places I've lived. And the neighbors seem nice. And the sellers seem nice; they stopped by while we were there, and we had a nice chat with them. And I know the neighborhood, having lived in the immediate area for the past six years and the slightly larger area for the past twelve. And I keep remembering that friends of mine have spent a year or more searching for a place to live in the Bay Area, and if I could just take this place, which I like a lot, it would be great to not have to go on looking. I expected the real estate agent to say, "Okay, you shouldn't rush into things, think it over, there are plenty of other places on the market," but instead he said, "Yeah, this is really quite nice for this price."
I keep thinking it's just New House Energy, that it's easy to be infatuated with the first place you look at, etc. etc. But none of the other places that we saw the outside of on Saturday appealed to me much at all; I liked the look of this one as soon as I saw it.
I am not an impulsive guy. I like to take things slow, ponder all the options, agonize over decisions.
I changed my appointment with my mortgage broker from tomorrow to today, and worked at home today instead of going in to work. This afternoon, I went over to the mortgage broker's office and presented him with the necessary paperwork. I had a bit of a panic when he told me that I'd have a hard time getting a loan if I didn't have four active credit cards (three was insufficient), but then he ran a credit report and discovered that I have excellent credit and that I apparently have about six active credit cards of various sorts, though I have no idea what some of them are. (One was a Bloomingdale's charge card that I used once, four years ago, to buy towels for me and a wedding present for my brother and sister-in-law.) There was some worry over not having paper statements from eTrade regarding the stock I own, but we logged onto their site (I had my password with me) and found an official-looking printable page and printed that out.
Tomorrow morning I'm going to go meet with the real estate agent again and try to put together an offer.
It's exciting; also nervewracking. I was going to say I'd never made this big a life decision before, much less made it entirely on gut feeling, but I guess that's not true; the choice to go to Swarthmore was similarly unsupported, and I'm very pleased with how that came out.
Anyway, I imagine that chances are quite good that my offer won't be accepted, given this other offer that's supposed to be coming in. In which case I'll start the long slog of looking for a place to live, in a more organized fashion. That might even be for the best; I was having qualms about kitchen size earlier this evening, and putting together a down payment on short notice is going to be a hassle. (Manageable, just a bit more chaotic than the slow building-up of funds over the next couple months that I'd intended.) But I suspect it'll be very hard for me to find anything better than this for this price. And if they accept the offer, I think I'll be very very pleased.
