When we started seriously looking for houses a couple of months ago, we really liked the first one we set foot into. It felt weird to make an offer on the very first one, but it suited us just right, so we did. Unfortunately, so did someone else, for some amount higher than ours.

Oh well, life’s like that, so we moved on. We saw a lot more houses, and even found one that would do, but it wasn’t as good as that first one. We made an offer on that second-best one knowing that we’d have to put some money into it to get it whipped into the kind of shape that we wanted. That offer sat for a while, as it was a short-sale house, which is more complicated than either buying from a person or from a bank.

 

On a whim last weekend, while we were out checking out some open homes in the neighborhood, we drove back by the original house. And a sign was back up in the yard. We asked our realtor to check on it, and sure enough, it went back on the market on Monday. So by Monday afternoon, we renewed our original offer, just initialling the date changes.

 

After all of this hurry up and wait business, weren’t we surprised to hear back from that seller by Wednesday? They made a counteroffer to our offer, but at least it wasn’t about the money. Suddenly they seem in an awful hurry to get this house closed, so they weren’t giving us much time for our inspections.

 

We countered with a more reasonable time, and sure enough, today they accepted it. We’ve made a deposit and scheduled inspections. I’m going to go take a water sample tomorrow, and we’re also going to finalize things with our mortgage broker. It makes your head spin, how quickly it goes from slug slow to fast, fast, fast, but we’ve only got about a week to get all of this together. We’re for damn sure not going to let any holdups be from us, so we’ll be burning that candle on both ends this week.

 

We close escrow in the middle of September, one weekend before opening day. We’ll be at both, so there won’t be much sleeping going on for the next month. We do have to pack, after all, somewhere in that time, and go fishing. Priorities are important in this family, after all.