Getting our house Part 1

I finally have a space to tell the story about how we got our wonderful home! It would be like a 10-part post on Instagram and I wasn’t going to commit to that.

We used to live in eastern Washington for one year from 2020-2021, moved back to Arizona due to the chaos of covid, then almost immediately I was like nope, we need to return. We obviously weren’t going to make another $8,000 move right away so stuck it out for a couple years until we decided it was time. We were also moving my mother-in-law with us, so knew we’d need more space and ideally we’d buy because we didn’t want to move again for a very long time and didn’t want to deal with a rental. 

We went back and forth on if we’d buy without seeing a house first, and decided that if the right house came up, we’d consider it. I worked home health in the area so knew the neighborhoods in general and had some ideas of where we’d want to live. We reached out to a friend of mine who’s a lender, and he connected us with a realtor, and we got everything squared away. I was feeling some pressure to get a house because I knew I’d be taking a slight pay cut switching positions, and I wanted to be sure we’d easily qualify for the range we were looking at without any surprises.

The market was relatively slim pickings when we were looking (July/August 2023). It was the beginning of the slight downturn so houses weren’t selling instantly, but there still wasn’t a lot of availability, especially in the areas we were looking. 

One house did pop up though that we thought would work well for us. The house itself was great, the yard had a lot of protentional for a garden, etc. BUT. It was on a busy street. We were definitely getting more house for our dollar due to the location, which seemed like a reasonable trade-off because we did need the space. I thought I was remembering the area correctly and didn’t think traffic would be too bad. We had some friends look at it and do a drive around the neighborhood and looking back there were red flags, but at the time we thought they were fine. Just fiiiiiine. We’d have a home!

The seller’s realtor initially said they were motivated to sell, so we put in our offer with a 10-day inspection period with a 30-day close. We could make it work for Vince to fly up for the inspection in that time, though not ideal. The sellers then came back asking for a 45-day close since they needed to arrange things for their move, which was no big deal, so we agreed to it, and the countered with full asking price with no room to budge. We thought it was weird that they’d list with no wiggle room, but it was still a weird time in the market so we went with it since it was only a $5,000 difference than our original offer anyways.

We then started planning for Vince to fly up for the inspection and realized flight prices had changed dramatically since we last looked so the 24-hour trip was going to cost over $1,000 and I’d have to take a day off work to be with the kids, which was just not possible at that time. If we could delay the inspection by 1 business day, it would cost less than half that and overall be easier on us. My realtor said it was a totally reasonable request, especially with a long close and shouldn’t be an issue. BUT! It apparently was for the sellers.

They said no and were adamant about it. Our realtor told their realtor our reasons why and they basically said they didn’t care. They had their own inspection on a house they were wanting to buy and weren’t going to change the date. Our realtor then told them that we may pull our offer if we can’t make it work, and they said it was a risk they were willing to take. I was shocked by the because if our offer fell through, they’d have to pull the offer on their house so they’d lose out anyways!

Initially I was like, “Whatever, we’ll just go with the original plan and eat the cost”. Vince immediately said, “Nope, this feels wrong, I want to pull out”. I was of course thinking about our earnest money and didn’t want to throw that away! We talked back and forth and realized the energy was off – why wouldn’t they want to help us when we helped them? I know we wouldn’t have to deal with the sellers after we owned the house, but it still felt wrong to buy something that would have any kind of negative energy attached to it. Were they trying to hide something and didn’t want us there for the inspection? Were they just shitty selfish people? If so, part of them would still remain with the house and we didn’t need that! So I decided to fully trust Vince’s instinct and agreed to let the house go.

Our realtor then told us that since we were still in the inspection period we could pull our offer and still get our earnest money back! So that was a happy choice for sure. Once we got to town we did a drive-by of the house and it was most definitely not on the less-busy part of the road I was thinking it was on and was on an incredibly busy section of the road. We would have been so unhappy with that location! Such a blessing in disguise that it fell through.

We stayed in a rental from our realtor for about a month when we first moved up here and it wasn’t far from the house we were going to buy, so I’d pass it often. We watched it on Zillow and the price ended up dropping over $60,000 before they pulled it off the market completely. I’d seen the couple that lived there outside multiple times and saw as they unloaded their moving pods, realizing they ended up having to stay because the house didn’t sell.

On one hand I was like, YOU BROUGHT THIS UPON YOURSELF YOU GREEDY BRATS! But truly, I do hope this was also a blessing in disguise for them. They had a job and a house lined up back east, so this was obviously not what they had planned. 

In part 2 I will share how we got our actual house.