Dashing Hopes

Posted Sunday, February 22, 2009 11:16 PM

Honey and I have been looking at houses - obviously we MUST be breezing thru wedding prep, because hey - we can squeeze in the stress of buying a house on top of getting married, right??

We've had a great time looking at places, liking some, making snide comments about others and generally grooving on the idea that we have similar tastes in what we want in our first house. We both love hardwood floors, lots of light and exposed brick. Don't paint the wood and have a older, more deco influenced style.

Our problem began with liking one on a cute, brick lined street. It was a flip, and the people who did the renovations must have had us in mind when they did it. It had a great little sun room my plants would love - a kitchen I could see myself cooking in; everything was great. Sure, there were tiny nits to pick (such as the kitchen paint, an ugly peachy color) but generally very little that we would change, even liking the window treatments they put up to sell the house. We eagerly told our RE agent that we would be making an offer and start the process of buying it.

We were not prepared for someone else to be putting a bid in as well. Seriously? In this economy - who would be so brazen? We conferred and asked opinions and came up with the plan that our offer would be list price - there was no way that the initial offer would be for the full amount, and ours would trump the other and we would be victorious. Nope - our agent came back and advised that we needed to up our offer. We hastily came up with a figure - hoping that it would seal the deal and we could get back to making our invitations, a far more important goal than this small time stuff...

When we got the email back saying we shouldn't keep our hopes up - a bit of me died. FI was stronger throughout the whole ordeal, she's been through this before. Me, I lost a bit of a future I could almost touch. Sigh.

-Groom