House hunt over!

The last week and a half has been a real roller coaster ride. In my last post, I was telling you all that we had found a beautiful house that we were likely going to make an offer on. Well, we went to see a different house, decided it wasn't the right house for us, and went to call the Realtor of the beautiful house because we wanted to see it again and likely put in an offer. The house had sold that morning. Our Realtor had even told their Realtor to call us if there was an offer, but he didn't. So there went that house! It was quite devastating at the time. Back to square one. Luckily, there are always more houses coming on the market, and on Saturday night I found another one that I wanted to see. So we went to see that one on Sunday afternoon (Happy Mother's Day to me - more house hunting!). It was a brand new house on a quiet street, great access to everything, reasonable sized yard, walkout basement, etc. - nice house. We decided that although it wasn't perfect (three bedrooms instead of four mainly) we would go for it and put an offer in. So we did! And so it began:(.

They didn't respond to our offer until Monday afternoon - again we had to wait! We countered immediately, and waited again . . . another whole day until they responded again. On our counter offer, we had stayed pretty close in price to our original offer, explaining that the fact that there was no deck or concrete pad made it worth less, since those are not optional things, and I was pretty sure most builders kind of make you pay for it and do it when you build a house. I felt like those two things should be included, but since we were now going to have to pay for them, we weren't going to budge too far on our price. After a whole day of waiting for them, they came back to us with a price $1000 under their original counter offer. We took that as a sign that they were not getting our point and probably thought we were just being jerks, so we resigned ourselves to the fact that we would probably not get this house. We put in a final offer that was $9000 under their last counter offer, and pretty much kept looking for another house.

In our search, we came across a different house that looked promising! A 4 bedroom house that was quite nice. The downside to this one? It was on a street that was probably going to get reasonably busy. We agonized and agonized over this one! How important was the street versus the house?? While we were agonizing over this one, the sellers of the other house came back to us with THEIR final offer, which was $5000 over ours. We gave our Realtor the go ahead to cut them loose, and we prepared our offer for this other house. We never had complete peace about it, but it seemed like a busier street was a small price to pay at that point! We literally were just about to submit this offer when the other guys called back - apparently their final offer was coming down a bit closer to ours after all! They must have thought we were bluffing, but when we were prepared to walk away, decided to take another look:). They came to within $2000 of our offer, and after some discussion, Brian and I decided to meet them in the middle and take this one rather than the 4 bedroom one on the busy street. Unfortunately, things didn't end there! We countered almost immediately, and AGAIN they didn't respond right away! The next morning, we told our Realtor to give them until noon - it was soooo frustrating! Such a roller coaster ride! We get the house, we don't get the house, we get it, we DON'T! Argh! They ended up responding JUST before noon accepting our offer. And so we bought the house! Not the dreamiest of negotiation processes, but hey - we don't need to deal with them again after we buy their house! Brian had a lot of second thoughts afterwards because it had three bedrooms, and because we want to have three kids that means two of them will have to share. I tried to convince him that they would be okay for now, and we'll put two bedrooms in the basement for when they get a bit older. So that is that! It's a beautiful house, and while it will cost quite a bit to get the yard done and get the window coverings, washer and dryer and basement done, at least we know that it will be done the way we like it! I'm willing to pay a bit of premium for that, especially after the things we've seen! Possession date is July 8th, so we'll have a week to change houses. Sooo happy to be done with the house hunt!

This past weekend we were in Canmore so I could run my big 6k race:). It was a nice weekend! Brian's parents came down, too, and Brian's aunt and cousin were there as well since his cousin was running the half marathon. I ended up getting 54th out of 550 people, so that was pretty good! It was sooo hard - hill running is not an enjoyable thing:(. I had hoped to not have to walk at all, since I've been able to run 6k for quite a while now, but there was a hill so steep I just couldn't do it - my legs were burning just walking up it! Crazy! I posted a good time (33:40) but it turns out the race was only 5.5k instead of 6 - a bit of a rip off if you ask me. My watch said 5.5, and we drove it later and sure enough, it was only 5.5. Annoying, but if they had added another half kilometer of hills it might have been the death of me, so it's probably a good thing!

Adam is getting his eye teeth, and the last few days have been pretty rough. One big grouch he's been! Luckily he's been sleeping well - he had two 2 hour naps yesterday, and then a 13 hour night. Unfortunately, he was still grouchy today:(. Poor kiddo! He got his first haircut last Friday, too! He did great - got a bit restless towards the end, and I just gave him a snack and he was fine. What a little man he is now! Nothing specifically new to report on Lynsey - she's just growing up:). We did get her a bike last week! She caught on really quickly, but had a few falls early on which shook her confidence. I'm giving her a few days off and then I'll make her get back on - she has to learn she can't just quit when things don't go quite right. She keeps wanting me to read her stories out of my Bible, which I gladly do, but question how much she understands! She was sad the other day and when I asked her why, she said she couldn't tell me. Is the secrecy starting already?? Eek!