...And the Hunt Begins Again

Found this in a basement of a house we looked at.
May it forever haunt your dreams.

Welcome back, America.

The Houghs have been living in central Michigan for about a year and a half now, but regardless of the fact that we're both holding down well-paying jobs and are in close proximity to all sides of our family, we still aren't feeling 100% settled up here.

And that's because we're still living in a f***ing Rental.

Not a bad floor plan - if not a little small - and
the appliances were pretty old.

While this little house of ours is getting us by - there's plenty of storage space for all our crap, the neighborhood's great, we're centrally located in town to just about everything you could ask for - it still isn't quite 'home.'


The house we've been renting since June of 2015 is small, it's old, and the yard looks like a hobo without his shirt on.  We have my Granny's piano in our dining room, my library has been sitting in a mountain of cardboard boxes atop steel shelving in the basement (undisplayed), and I have stacks of swords everywhere because there's no real place to display them properly.

Long story short, Kris and I are ready to be home-owners again.

I know I've mentioned this before, but we were fortunate enough to make a decent chunk of change off the sale of our Majorama House in Orlando.  To date, that money has been sitting safely in our local Credit Union, biding its time until we can use it to throw down a down payment on our next house.  This next house of ours, dear readers, shall hopefully be the last house Kris and I ever purchase, and I'm aiming to die in it as an old man.

Checking out a built-in library in a property

Preferably in front of the fireplace, with a sword across my lap and a Who album on the turntable.

Anyway.

Now that the Holiday juggernaut has come and gone, and things have once again fallen back into a familiar grind - Kris and I are back at work, the kids are back in school - we've decided to start actively looking for a new place to live.

Our current lease is up in June, so while we're entering the market at a less-than-opportune time (not a lot of inventory available in the dead of winter, so it's definitely a Seller's Market up here in Midland), Kris and I are hoping we can catch something within the next few months and be able to move out before having to extend our lease any.

Checking out a not-so-nice deck of a house that could have worked,
had the owners actually bothered to take care of it these last couple decades. . .

After asking around, Kris and I were led to a realtor that works through the same real estate company we use as our landlord's rental agent.  This guy, Rick (at left), is known for being straight-forward and honest with houses, which Kris and I prefer.  We wanted someone with experience who won't fluff a place up if he doesn't think it's worth it, and fortunately that's not something we have to worry about with him.

After being approved through a lender, we were ready to start viewing available properties. . . and I remembered how much I loathe house-hunting.  Of the five we saw over the course of the last week or so, some were nice, others were comically bad, and some could have worked if only one or two things had been different regarding the floor plan.  Neither of us want to settle, considering we're betting on this next house to be the last we ever own.

I'll use this particular house on Mason St. as an example.  This old Dow-designed house was in our price range, in a desirable neighborhood, with some great landscaping, and three living rooms. . .

. . . a built-in library, with a nice staircase, room for a piano, and an indoor opening that looked down into the kitchen. . .

Slate floors, plenty of retro charm. . .

. . . BUT antiquated windows that would all have to be replaced (they were from the '60s or '70s.)  And replacing an entire house's windows is not cheap, folks.

 Nor is replacing an entire house-worth of peeling wallpaper.  Had this house been about $100,000 less, Kris and I would have pounced on it, but, sadly, we had to pass on it.  This sort of 'on one hand this, but on the other hand, this' thing is starting to get really, really old, and we've only been looking for a week or so.  Can't imagine how many more white hairs I'm going to start sprouting if we're going to be at this for a few months. . .

Rick and Kris, inspecting another property's living room windows. . .

Kris and I have realized we need at least three bedrooms and two bathrooms in our next house (well, four bedrooms or three bedrooms and an office space for Kris, to be exact.)  We'd also need a Living Room (for the couches, TV, etc.) as well as a Family Room (for a fireplace, our library, the bar stuff, etc.)  A two-car garage, a large basement (to house our storage, our exercise equipment, drum set, girls' playroom etc.), and a shed.  In addition, we'd like to be on this side of town, near the kids' schools and where the neighborhoods are a little quieter.

Retro '70s basement, anyone?

Maybe that's frivolous, maybe that's being too picky. . . but, damn it, you know what?  I'm pushing 40, and I deserve this crap in my life, already.

We'll keep you posted with how this whole disaster of a situation unfolds. . .

- Brian

The Offer

Hi, Nation.

Hey, remember when I said we were moving?  Back up to Michigan?  Well, a big step of that process, in addition to the packing and moving and getting jobs and all that crap, is the selling of our current house.  The housing market has improved somewhat since when we bought the house three years ago, so we were optimistic about selling our home relatively quickly.

But we had NO idea just how quickly it would go.

We hired a realtor named Ken, who came highly recommended from one of Kris' church friends and happens to be one of Central Florida's Top 100 realtors, and he came over and snooped out our house.  Now, we're not slobs or anything, but we didn't realize our house was as well-maintained and clean as it was - Ken looked around, asked some questions about the property, and informed us that our house was in amazing shape and we should be able to get what we wanted for it no problem at all.  This was indeed good news.

See, three years ago the couple that owned the home (the only people to ever live in the home, by the way - they built it) put it on the market at a pre-appraisal rate their selling agent recommended.  We checked out the home, loved it, and put in an offer for that was about two grand less than what they were asking for, as that was all we could get from our lender at the time (despite our excellent credit rating, we had no money for a deposit, having not all that much saved up at the time, thank you very much second child.)  Despite our lower offer, the elderly couple liked us, thanks to our 'adorable' little kids who we brought along with us to view the property, and accepted our offer.  When the property appraisal came in, it valued the house a little less than their initial offer, which is what we ended up paying for it.

(Hooray.)

Don't ask me what the hell's up with our tree.  I won't miss it.

Fast forward three years to Present Day.  In the couple years we've owned the joint, we've paid off about $7,000 on it, and it's valued at over thirty grand more than what it was when we bought it.  Ken decided to list it at that price, based on comparable properties in the area, and see what happens.  We figured we'd generate a few bites in the first weekend, but none of us - Ken included - dreamed of the amount of frenzy our modest, little house would generate.

The ad went up Thursday morning, and within hours Kris (who was the contact number for the property) started receiving phone calls from buying agents like crazy.  She showed the house to one set of buyers that morning, before she went to work, and scheduled six showings for the next day, during that hour between when she had to drop the kids off of school and when she went to work.  Then, on Saturday (when Yours Truly was dealing with alligators, six-year-olds, and oppressive Florida sun with the Daisies, if you'll be so good as to recall), our house was bombarded with a steady stream of buyers.  

Long story short, we received over a dozen offers - some generous, others comically awful - and lost count of how many people viewed our house, but by Sunday morning we had narrowed down all of our offers and interested parties to two buyers.  Of these two, one ended up being cleared right away, and we pounced on it.

And so, dear readers, we have now begun the so-called 'closing' process once again, this time on the other side of the bargaining table.  We'll be walking away from this whole house-thing with a considerable nest egg, having nothing more than the dumb luck of buying a house when the market sucked, taking care of the place, and selling it back when the market was awesome.

To say we're happy about this turn of events would be. . . well, one hell of an understatement.

As our good friend John "Hannibal" Smith used to say. . .

- Brian