The past 2 weeks have been SOOOOO draining. We’ve been house-hunting, driving around to get to know the area, meeting with banks and real-estate agents, or calling about apartments non-stop and it’s been rather overwhelming. Luckily, Addie only took 3 days or so to adapt to our new place and has been sleeping, eating, napping, and playing like a champ so at least we haven't had to worry about her at all. She has been on her very best behavior during all of our driving around and looking at houses and whatnot too, so really— Addie deserves a pony for having put up with everything we’ve put her through lately.
So, we are realizing we under-estimated a lot of things about our move. Part of our relocation package was a free month in furnished corporate housing, with all of our own things being kept in storage. We figured that if we found a house we wanted right away, that a month would be long enough to close and whatnot. We figured that if it went over a couple of weeks or so, no biggy... we can just pay to stay in our corporate housing.
Well, we really haven't been having too much luck in the housing department. We have found plenty of nice houses, but each has some tragic flaw like being directly by a busy road, having cliffs in the back yard, being surrounded by swamplands, or some other deal-breaking defect. Then the places that seem like they’d be great options are all short sales (which could take months to close) and we really don’t have the time for that. We did find one house last week that would have been a great home for us, but it was on the upper end of our target price-range anyway and it immediately needed a new 15k roof and other fixes. We gave them a low-ball offer just to see if perhaps they were that desperate to sell, but our offer was declined just like we assumed it would be.
Anyway, to add to our current crunch, we found out that it'll cost us about $140 a day for us to stay in our corporate housing passed our one month mark (june 19th). We totally thought it'd be about 1/2 that, so staying in corporate really is no longer an option. But that leaves us with the problem of finding a suitable place to live with a landlord that will allow us to do a short-term lease or pay month-to-month. That is actually a lot harder to find than one would think. I know we’ll find something that’ll work, but that problem has yet to be remedied at this point.
Our current hope is a place that we looked at today that just went on the market. It is a bank-owned foreclosure and with some new carpet, it would be PERFECT for us. It's priced really low for what a great house it is, so it already has tons of prospective buyers, us included! We're putting a very generous offer in on it tomorrow and hopefully it will be enough to beat out the competition. We won’t hear back until the end of next week though, so I’m going to be going completely insane until we hear back. Assuming our offer is chosen, it could take a month more after that before everything is official and we can move in. If this house does go through for us, that would still leave us homeless in two weeks until the house could close, but we're hoping to find a short-term living arrangement that could work for us soon.
So that’s the scoop on us. Sam starts work on Monday, so we’ve been trying to enjoy our down-time together as much as we can. Despite all of the house-hunting and worrying and meetings with real-estate agents and whatnot, we have really enjoyed the fact that we get to be together all day long, every day. That will soon come to an end, but it’s been cool while it lasted.
I don’t have any new, relevant pictures to offer you, so to make my boring post more aesthetically pleasing, here are a few cute pics of Addie I took of her back in October: 
7 comments:
oh man! that is stressful! i hope you guys get that house!!! i didn't think house hunting would be that difficult either! i'm glad addie adjusted well though. that always makes life a little easier! you're in our prayers about the house! try not to stress (although i know how hard that would be!)
Love the edits on those pics.
We've been going through many of the same frustrations. Although, we're not in as much as a time-financial crunch, it has been really hard finding a good house to buy. We feel ya! Hang in there and good luck!
I hope your offer goes through!!!! *crosses fingers*
I didn't even think about how tough it might be to find a month-to-month rental place. Maybe you could just do a year lease and sell your contract on craigslist... maybe it's not as easy to do that there as it is here.
GOOD LUCK!!!!!!
Best of wishes to Sam as he starts work today. Hope it's a wonderful job with great people.
Good luck on finding a good home
Everything will work out, but I can totally see why you are stressed. Moving and getting settled is really tough. In a year or so you'll look back and wonder what all the fuss was about :)
Makes me remember when we were in the same spot. No one wanted to rent to use for 2-3 months, so we wound up paying a bunch for a crummy place that let you do it, but for extra fees. I'm sure there's lots of apartments that'll do the same, but it's spendy. You might also consider the extended StayAmerica or equiv. There's a long-term hotel down the street from us here that's 300-400 a week, I think. It'd do in a pinch for you.
Good luck with the house hunting. It's hard to wait and be in limbo.
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