house-hunting. part three.

read parts one and two here and here.

after talking to joe we decided that he and perry would go take a look at the house missy texted me about and then he'd call me if it was worth me seeing. after walking through, joe said he really liked it and thought i should look at it, so i set up a showing for 4:15 so i could go straight from work. the listing agents had decided to host an open house from 5-7 that night because of the excessive interest and number of showing requests they'd received, so perry wanted to get me in before the open house started.

when i arrived at the house, the owner was standing in the driveway waiting for his wife to get home because she hadn't been notified of our 4:15 showing. joe arrived with bennett minutes later, so we all were introduced to the seller and his wife when she arrived. they left and then we walked through the house. immediately i knew i wanted to make an offer. while the house needed some updates, it didn't need anything immediately or anything major (like heat and air conditioning- ha). plus it had all of the "must-haves" and several of the "wants" from the list joe and i made before we started looking at homes.

we quickly went back to the agency, drew up the paperwork, and got our full-price offer submitted before 6pm. we weren't newbies anymore and weren't messing around. when you make an offer you have to promise money called "earnest money," which basically just shows you, as a buyer, are serious about your offer. we didn't have to write a check, but we had to give the number of the check we would use should the offer be accepted. i didn't have my purse with me, but we had just done this days before with check 1559. i had written a couple of checks since then that i could think of, so i estimated we would use check 1661. joe chimed in and suggested we put 1563 just to be safe, so that's what we did. when i got to my purse, i pulled out my checkbook. check 1563 was the first one. God is cool.

in our offer we asked for a written response by 9pm. the next few hours i was on edge. feeling burned by the situation with the first house just two days before made me anxious that we would lose it. joe was calmly enjoying his round of 9 holes for golf league, naturally. 9pm came and went and we hadn't heard anything of substance. the listing agent threw out all sorts of excuses for why they just couldn't get a response in by 9 and assured us that the sellers would sign.

i slept restlessly all night and woke up early friday morning. i resisted the urge to call perry at 6am and impatiently waited til i finally heard from him around 9am. it wasn't good news. perry told me, "it's happening again, liz..."