Pregnancy and Real Estate

The two generally don't mix. Pregnancy is a particularly trying time because your emotions tend to rule you. I had to really watch myself lately and Brian had to be my voice of reason. I'm an impulsive person any day of the year, and I tend to be ruled by my heart rather than my head, so you can imagine how difficult it has been to make logical, non-emotion-based decisions about houses while pregnant. We looked at so many houses - well, when I say "we" I mean me and my wonderful best friend, Barbie. We narrowed our search down to 4 neighbourhoods, eliminated all the houses that didn't meet both mine and Bri's criteria, and then only presented those to him that met my requirements and *might meet all of his. Barbie has also been a voice of reason in this process.

We looked at building a new house, and we found the perfect lot to build on, found a floorplan we liked, but not all of our criteria were met. We weighed the benefits of building a new house in an up and coming neighbourhood, and enquired about options for making the house fit both our criteria. We were almost sold, almost put down a deposit, but something wasn't right. The house was a few thousand dollars over our budget and for the money, it seemed like the benefits of a new house didn't justify the price per square foot.

On the day we found the perfect house we looked at I think 5 houses. I already knew from the pictures that the one we chose would be the most likely candidate, and I think Barbie did, too, because she saved that one till last. When we walked in the door I knew immediately. Barbie did, too. Every criteria for both me and Brian were met:
Granite counter tops, wood floors, and a floor plan that orients the couch away from the kitchen for me - my pet peeve about our current house is that I can see the kitchen (and any mess) while watching TV, and that causes me to be unable to relax until I clean it up. For Brian it was the 3 car garage, all bedrooms upstairs, and an in-ground sprinkler system - what guy wouldn't want a bigger garage? and he's always hated that we don't have sprinklers at our current house, and if you look at the state of our lawn you can see why!

We put in a rather low-ball offer on the house knowing that the sellers wouldn't go for it, but we wanted to start low to keep their expectations down. They came back with a counter that seemed still unreasonable, so we countered with what we considered another low-ball offer which we thought they'd reject again. I was fully prepared to walk away from this house if we didn't get it for what we wanted. Which is unusual for me given, as I said, that I am impulsive and my heart was already sold on this house. Brian is completely the oppposite. He's ruled by his head. I see this as a perfect example of how he has influenced me over the years to become a more rational person. We were both stunned when they accepted our offer!

Now that I can let my guard down, I've already hung up all my art work in my mind, and repainted the pink bedroom to a nice manly grey-blue for the kid, with a sports car mural on the wall (for Brian ;-))

The inspection went well. There are only a few minor things wrong with the house that are easily fixed. We submitted an amendment to the sellers in the hope that they will commit to fixing some of them, but we're not optomistic.

Our current house is getting a lot of activity. It's been like Grand Central Station here over the past few days. One realtor asked me not to accept any offers over the weekend because her client really wants the house. That's all very promising.

Speaking of activity, the kid is now moving quite a bit. On Friday night as we were on our way down to Trudy's to meet some friends, he gave me a nice jab in the left ovary. OOOF!