Hello dear, loyal readers. Been wondering where I've been? Have you been saying to yourself, "Kara promised she was going to do a post about Dylan's time with his grandparents while she and Mike were gallivanting around Amsterdam. Where is it? What's up with that?" That post is still coming, I promise. Since we got back from Amsterdam, life has gotten a bit topsy turvy. Here's what happened.
After we got back, we had only a couple of days to unpack, spend the last of our time with my parents before they headed back to Dallas and recuperate from our whirlwind travels before we got back to working on something that we've been stewing since October - the addition on our house. We had a meeting with our architect that made the record scratch and us to go into complete shock. Not only was the addition going to go WAY over the top end of our budget, but it was going to take twice as long as we had estimated AND absolutely cause us to move out of our house for most of that renovation time. Yikes!
Given that we've already invested more into our house than we can recuperate (in the present market at least), putting that addition on would somewhat overbuild us for the area which didn't fare well for our add on investment. If we were absolutely, guaranteed to stay in the house for another 10 years, we probably would have gone forward. But, here's the thing. The schools in our area are tricky. Boston is on this wacky lottery system. Even though we have several great schools in our community, the lottery system doesn't provide any guarantee that your kid will get a slot in your "chosen" schools. And given that we'll have a little one in school in 3 years or so, we had a lot to stew over.
After a lot of debate, weighing pros and cons, and several sleepless nights, we came to the very difficult decision that we would not do the addition and would, instead, use that money to make a down payment on a new home in an area with a more secure school system. We're still very comfortable in our house and there's no hurry to move. However, after getting active in the real estate market in our desired town for a week, we were hit with more harsh realities. If you see something you want, you have to get it RIGHT THEN! On our first day out, we saw a house we liked very much that ticked almost all the things off our wish list. So, the next day, we thought we'd inquire about it. It had 6 (!) offers and to get into the game you had to offer 50K over asking with no contingencies on financing. Gulp! We learned very quickly that the competition would be stiff.
So, what does this mean for us now? It means that we are actively looking. The thing is that our wants lead us to about a half dozen towns. That makes shopping pretty time consuming. We're working with no less than 4 different agents in different capacities, going to open houses Saturdays and Sundays, quite often even seeing several different houses on lunch break or after working and are constantly pouring over new listings. It's pretty much overwhelming our lives.
What's even more frustrating is that, despite the fact that we're not in a hurry, we are in a hurry at the same time. By the mere fact that the house hunt takes over your life, you want to minimize the amount of time that it does so. The decision to move has been made. Now we feel in a state of limbo. Not only that, but it creates a ridiculous amount of stress. We've seen houses that we like and could see ourselves living there but are not sure if it's "the one" and then there's the discussions and number crunching and city researching that goes along with it. Plus, the self doubt of "will we know if it's the one?", "do we feel pressured to buy just because of the fierce competition", "do we really want to compromise the mud room?", etc, etc, etc...it drives me batty.
On top of all that, we have to face leaving our house.....our HOME. We have put years of love, renovation and personalization in that place and making it a wonderful place to live. There are so many things we love about the house, our neighbors and our neighborhood that leaving it is going to be a very sad thing to do.
And, on top, top of that, we have to deal with the thoughts of putting our house on the market to sell. I've only sold one place in my life, my beloved condominium. And, even though I spent 2 years completely making over that place, all the little details that had to be attended to in order to make it "market ready" were a serious pain in the booty! Thinking about doubling that square footage and adding in a kiddo to the mix....well, let's just say the "to do" list is already growing at a ridiculous rate for that. And, we don't even know when we'll be putting it on the market yet!
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