A book and a house
The big news is THE AGENT WANTS MY BOOK! I don’t have a contract (yet) but she emailed me and said that our relationship was now a professional one. She’s a great agent. She sold Katie’s book to Simon and Schuster (the Pocket Books division) and got her a nice, fat advance. Here’s hoping she does the same for me!
Today I wanted to write the story of our house. It’s a hot, humid day here in Central Ohio so Noah and I are staying at home inside enjoying our air conditioner. I’m hanging out laundry and reading Morgan’s Passing. He’s playing with his Fisher-Price Main Street and listening to Sharon, Lois & Bram. I love our house best on relaxed stay-at-home days like this.
OK, here’s the story; this will probably be a pretty long entry.
This was our second househunt but I won’t go into our first disastrous househunt. Suffice to say that this time around we were a bit more realistic about our income bracket and didn’t waste time lamenting the neighborhoods that we couldn’t afford. I knew that we needed to find a good mortgage person so I called a tacky little realtor who seemed to specialize in our price range and preferred locations and asked him for recommendations. He sent us to Val. I met with her and asked her for other realtor recommendations and she gave us two. I chose the one with email, natch. That led us to Jeff.
Jeff’s picture on his page doesn’t do him justice. In person he wears sheer polyester shirts, more than a couple of gold chains, and a great big, onyx pinkyring. He drives a maroon luxury car and his office has fake wood paneling. We liked all of this about him; he reminded us of John Candy who just happens to be one of Brett’s favorite actors.
In good (albeit heavily ringed) hands, we started looking.
We set our sights low. We’d drive through neighborhoods looking for appliances in the front lawn ‘cuz then we knew that the houses were probably in our price range. When we saw “For Sale” signs, we’d look for tell-tale indications of affordability: no garage, lack of basement, seedy surroundings. There were some things that were non-negotiable like being near a busline (we have one car and Brett works downtown) and a decent yard. For me, it was all about the yard. I wanted a nicely fenced-in affair with enough greenery to be interesting but I noticed that things like trees sometimes put the house out of our range. (Imagine my surprise to find out that things I preferred also seemed to be preferred by others so that the price would eke just beyond our reach.) We decided that tacky lawn ornaments were a good thing in a neighborhood (unmolested plastic flamingos and kissing garden gnomes meant no rowdy teenagers storming through people’s frontyards) and that manicured lawns guaranteed retirees home during the day keeping an eye on things.
We found three houses that we wanted but didn’t get. These are the three:
* A tiny white house without a basement but with a two car garage in a lousy neighborhood in a great suburb. The school district is excellent, the elementary school was just across the way. We figured we’d pack all of Noah’s giant toys (the train table, for example) into the attic garage and shove the washer/dryer into the kitchen. The yard was nice; big with one little tree and a privacy fence. We got outbid.
* A towering, hundred-year-old home on the edge of campus. (Clinton St. for those of you who know the area.) It was massive (by our standards) and haphazardly kept. It had the original clawfoot tub, a walk-up, finishable attic, and a strange small yard that came with one of those awful cement geese. We looked at the towering ceilings, the extensive woodwork (painted a horrible mauve and sickening skyblue) and wanted to put a bid in immediately. Wonderful Jeff expressed his concern. His exact words were: “If it was just the two of you I’d say go for it. When the boiler blows (and it’s gonna blow) you can just put on extra sweaters and get through December. But you’ve got a kid and no way to pay for the things that are going to break in a house this old. And there’s no way you’re going to get FHA approval.” Down went that house.
* A tiny goldenrod house without a basement or garage on a dingy street in a nice neighborhood. This house was so cheap that our house payment would be practically non-existent. We figured we could just buckle down and live in its tininess long enough to get ahead financially and the move the hell away from there. Then our miracle house saved us.
Our miracle house is three streets over from the goldenrod house on a not-dingy street in that nice neighborhood. We stopped there only because the paper said that Cheryl’s Cookies was sponsoring that realtor’s open houses. What the hell, we figured, let’s go ahead and get a cookie. (This was miracle #1 because normally a measly cookie would not be enough to make us stop at a house we couldn’t afford and would probably just depress us.)
We drove up and noticed that the house was very cute. It also had a basement. We started playing “guess the price” on our way in. It had a nice open family room (ugly carpet but neutral so we didn’t notice it then) and then we saw the kitchen. The kitchen is not exactly paneled but it has real wood on the walls. My fashionable friends assure me that it’s lovely. I thought it was but I have no taste so don’t always trust my own judgment. Anyway, the kitchen has french doors, too. Brett and I looked at each other and raised our eyebrows. We added a couple thousand dollars to our original estimate. I went down to the basement to find a beautifully finished room with a great big walk-in-type closet lined with shelves. Oh the playroom possibilities! I started yearning for this house that was rapidly going up in price in my own mind. Then I walked through the (clean! shelved!) basement to a secret finished back room just right for middle-of-the-night paper shredding. (I remember that Noah was very excited about this “secret room”). Then upstairs we saw the three bedrooms with beautiful wooden floors and a big bathroom with *two* sinks! (If you have only one bathroom, make it a big bathroom — that’s my motto!) Then we tripped out the french doors onto a deck (!) and out into the backyard shaded by two big trees. (Our cottonwood tree is 4 or 5 stories tall. The black ash in back is a nice manageable size.) There was a sturdy, pretty shed and three pine trees along the privacy fence in back. The chain link fence on the sides was nicely hidden by lots of foliage. The yard is interesting with slopes and things and I could just see a puppy romping with our boy.
We got our cookies and Brett gave the realtor a fake name but then panicked and gave her his parent’s phone number. (This is unlike him. He always gives a fake name but usually a fake number as well. I told you he was odd.) We stumbled out into our car and started sighing and talking about this wonderful house that we could never afford and about all the things we could do there and how fabulous and how lovely and on and on and on.
Here’s where the miracles started coming at us so fast that we started getting winded from catching ‘em all.
Now Brett’s mom had been saying that his grandmother Ellen (her mother) was guiding us on our househunt. She was sure of it. Ok, I said, great ‘cuz we need all the help we can get. I really clung to the idea that was going to help us find a house where we would be happy. Believing that it was all going to be fine is what kept me sane in the process. Meanwhile, we put a bid in on the goldenrod house with an eye to saving money. Then fate began to conspire (or Ellen, who knows) to get us the Cheryl’s Cookies house:
Miracle #2: One day, Brett’s dad called to say please don’t give our number out when you’re giving people your alias but a realtor just called and the price on that house just went down $5000. Suddenly the house was almost affordable.
Miracle #3: I lamented to my mother about it. She offered to co-sign. Now we’d looked at other barely affordable houses (the big monstrous one listed above, for example) and this was the first she’d mentioned co-signing. We started getting excited.
Miracle #4: The goldenrod house people wouldn’t get back to us about our offer and it expired. We were pre-approved so if they’d taken it, we would have been stuck with that house.
Miracle #5: Our mortgage person had originally said that there was this fabulous FHA grant that would get our interest rate down to 4.5% for the first year, 5.5% for the next year, and 6.5% for the rest of the loan. Unfortunately, the bond money went quick. Then the night before we put our bid in, someone else’s contract fell through and the exact amount of bond money we needed became available. With that, our house payment would be less than we were paying in rent!
The final Miracle: It looked like we’d be stuck paying rent on our apartment and the mortgage for the house for three months and even though it was something we could do, it would certainly screw things up. Then our friend, Ann, suddenly needed an apartment and offered to take over our lease.
Voila! The miracle house was ours! It *is* ours!
I feel lucky that all sorts of things conspired to keep us nearly away from this house. If we had been looking in this price range (nearly $15,000 more than we’d been approved for), this would have just been another boring starter home. Since we’d spent so much time looking at tinny, little houses without amenities, our modest home bowled us over. And it still does. I love it here. I feel so lucky to be here. All the buggy things that are in any house haven’t dulled the charm for me. Sometimes I have to stop and marvel at the things that make this home so sweet. It’s not just the incredible basement playroom (all my friends are jealous of that playroom), but it’s the way the tree in the front yard across the street fills the picture window in our family room; the way the kitchen fan stirs up a breeze when I’m wiping down the kitchen counters; and the marvel of an attic fan that can cool the house in seconds when the night gets chilly after a hot day.
My gosh I’m grateful!
