We are not moving... thank god.
For those who don't know, we had made an offer on that house I posted about a couple of weeks ago. We sweated it out as the bank considered our offer and as competing offers came in, but in the end, we lost out to someone who undoubtedly offered the asking price. It was worth every bit of that and more, but we needed help with closing costs if we were going to have enough money left in the bank to do what we needed to do to our house to get it ready for the market. Thankfully all that is over and I feel like I can just rewind and pick up where we left off a few weeks ago.
But there's the awkward manner of cutting your real estate agent loose when he's spent some really valuable time with you thinking he could probably talk you into moving somewhere else, namely Williamson County, the promised land of public schools to the people in Davidson County it would seem. The only trouble is, apart from the areas where the lowest price property on the market right now is $500k (which is extremely out of our reach), I really have no interest in living in Williamson County. I would move there for the sake of Jonah's school, but nearly six years ago, we moved to this very school district for the third highest ranked elementary school in the state. We're good for at least another five years at least and possibly even for middle school, as it seems like it's coming up drastically as well. Our neighbor's daughter (the one I just did the costume for) just turned down the magnet school to stay at the middle school. Their older son did the same thing. For high school, we're screwed, but that's still so far away. I'll be ready to move by then and probably well before then.
The unfortunate thing is, this really would be a good time for us to move. As Chris has said, we would just be in a good school district in either Franklin or Nolensville. We wouldn't have that switch looming over us where we have to scramble to test for and enroll in the lottery for the magnet program or shop around for a private school or home school. And then, with the lower property taxes outside of Davidson County, if we were paying for private school as well, we'd actually come out better in Williamson County, financially. Also, with Chris working in Cool Springs now, he'd have a shorter commute, not that his isn't pretty painless as it is and he has the added benefit of going through some of the most lovely areas of Williamson County twice daily. There are always wild turkeys and deer in Hidden Valley. Always. There's also the small organic farm we're about to start a CSA with and a farm that seems to have nothing but Shetland ponies. Anyway, I contest that Nolensville, even though it's on the eastern side of 65, would still be just as long of a commute.
I actually found an amazing house in a neighborhood that's a little bit older than ours off McCrory Lane. That's really the area I want to be in. Dense forest, hilly, winding road. But because of that lovely geological interest, the house in question was on a small corner lot where the backyard consisted of a high deck and a driveway underneath it. The front yard was only slightly bigger. But it had a finished basement (which is what Chris really wants and is extremely hard to find in Tennessee, apparently) and a sauna. A freaking sauna. I shit you not. We probably could have low balled them down to about the same price as the foreclosure we were looking at. It was high on a hill (which seems to be the only cases when you can find basements around here) in a heavily wooded neighborhood. They didn't have a pool and no side walks. But, good god, it was gorgeous. I looked that house over online for probably three hours before we drove past it again and realized there was absolutely zero yard. We have to look for a house with Jonah in mind too and that wouldn't have been fair at all. There was a foreclosure down the street from it, but it was all stucco and trashed. There was also a cul-de-sac lot for sale right around the corner, but looking at it, I don't see how you could possibly ever build on it. It looks like a drainage ditch at the bottom of a hill. I'm going to be keeping an eye on that neighborhood, though. And land out on McCrory as well. I just really love this area. It's kind of like the city's best kept secret. Sure, it's safe and bland and suburban, but the lay of the land out here is just beautiful to me.
Chris is really bummed. Once I made my choice to agree to put in an offer, I sort of washed my hands of it. They were either going to accept our offer and our life was about to get a lot more complicated or they weren't and we could go back to doing what we were doing. I focused more on making lists for all the things we would need to do to our house to get it on the market in the coming weeks and growing increasingly anxious about just how much of those lists was going to fall on me to get done. Our agent felt like we'd have no problem selling, though he of course couldn't guarantee that. But our worst case scenario was that we didn't sell by the fall when people stop buying houses and we put it on the rental market which is apparently insane right now, with up to five applicants for every property if you price it right and rental prices easily paying for the mortgage and then some.
That's still not a terrible scenario and it's been hard to pull ourselves out of the house hunting/moving mindset. To make ourselves feel better, we're going to get our agent a gift certificate for he and his wife to have a nice dinner at City House. He took so much time with us. Meeting us at least four times in two weeks and spending the entire evening with us just about. Once to see the house the first time, then to see the house again and write our offer, then to come over and see what we might need to do to our house to put it on the market and talk about the possibilities there and finally to take us all over Williamson County looking at comparable houses to see what we could get for either the same price or just a tiny bit more (the answer is, on average, about 500 fewer square feet and a smaller yard, but you can't really compare it to a foreclosure that's priced $30k lower than it's worth). I want to tell him to keep us in the back of his mind if he finds a fixer upper in our price range in some of the areas we pointed out that we really liked. Or even better, some land we could build on.
There's five acres in Leipers Fork right now, but apparently there's so much rock, you can't install septic and it's not sewer accessible. So it's kind of useless for a home. The market is such that people are still hanging onto their land, waiting for prices to come back up. That was our original goal though. Get Jonah through school or mostly through school in this house. Then purchase a plot of land and begin paying it off while we're here. Then take our combined equity in our house and land to build. Sell, move, acquire goats and guns... profit.
But after a weekend in the yard, getting things put back together from six months of neglect while we worked on the floors inside, enjoying our somewhat private patio in our rather-large-for-suburbia yard which backs up to a tree line and a huge field instead of someone else's driveway, we feel a lot better about staying here and throwing ourselves into this house for the next 5 years and then seeing what happens. Still, it's tough seeing houses going in 30 days or less right now and realizing there are still amazing deals out there to be had (like this foreclosure was). This is like the sweet spot of the real estate market right now, where prices are still about 10% down from what they should be in a healthy market but houses are selling well in our particular area. It's kind of the perfect time to move for all the wrong reasons.
Even still, I really think we're better off staying here, continuing to build equity so we can make the move we really want to make. We would have been starting over on a 30 year mortgage when we had just refinanced on a 15 year last fall (no closing costs on that or we wouldn't have even been considering it). But it's tough to shake the possibilities.
Since then, I've purchased a bunch of stuff to work on drapes for the rooms I never got around to before Jonah was born (which is all but his room an ours). I've made a list of every single project that stands unfinished around the house (it is embarrassingly long). Finally caulked the front door we installed like three years ago (the penis jokes were infinite). Cleaned out three of seven gardens. And I'm meeting with painter number three this morning to see if she'll give me a price I'm willing to pay to have all these high walls and ceilings painted that I'd really rather leave to a professional with insurance. This instead of a quote to come in with a team and do the entire interior in something neutral so we could put it on the market (because right now, there's nothing neutral about it).
But there's the awkward manner of cutting your real estate agent loose when he's spent some really valuable time with you thinking he could probably talk you into moving somewhere else, namely Williamson County, the promised land of public schools to the people in Davidson County it would seem. The only trouble is, apart from the areas where the lowest price property on the market right now is $500k (which is extremely out of our reach), I really have no interest in living in Williamson County. I would move there for the sake of Jonah's school, but nearly six years ago, we moved to this very school district for the third highest ranked elementary school in the state. We're good for at least another five years at least and possibly even for middle school, as it seems like it's coming up drastically as well. Our neighbor's daughter (the one I just did the costume for) just turned down the magnet school to stay at the middle school. Their older son did the same thing. For high school, we're screwed, but that's still so far away. I'll be ready to move by then and probably well before then.
The unfortunate thing is, this really would be a good time for us to move. As Chris has said, we would just be in a good school district in either Franklin or Nolensville. We wouldn't have that switch looming over us where we have to scramble to test for and enroll in the lottery for the magnet program or shop around for a private school or home school. And then, with the lower property taxes outside of Davidson County, if we were paying for private school as well, we'd actually come out better in Williamson County, financially. Also, with Chris working in Cool Springs now, he'd have a shorter commute, not that his isn't pretty painless as it is and he has the added benefit of going through some of the most lovely areas of Williamson County twice daily. There are always wild turkeys and deer in Hidden Valley. Always. There's also the small organic farm we're about to start a CSA with and a farm that seems to have nothing but Shetland ponies. Anyway, I contest that Nolensville, even though it's on the eastern side of 65, would still be just as long of a commute.
I actually found an amazing house in a neighborhood that's a little bit older than ours off McCrory Lane. That's really the area I want to be in. Dense forest, hilly, winding road. But because of that lovely geological interest, the house in question was on a small corner lot where the backyard consisted of a high deck and a driveway underneath it. The front yard was only slightly bigger. But it had a finished basement (which is what Chris really wants and is extremely hard to find in Tennessee, apparently) and a sauna. A freaking sauna. I shit you not. We probably could have low balled them down to about the same price as the foreclosure we were looking at. It was high on a hill (which seems to be the only cases when you can find basements around here) in a heavily wooded neighborhood. They didn't have a pool and no side walks. But, good god, it was gorgeous. I looked that house over online for probably three hours before we drove past it again and realized there was absolutely zero yard. We have to look for a house with Jonah in mind too and that wouldn't have been fair at all. There was a foreclosure down the street from it, but it was all stucco and trashed. There was also a cul-de-sac lot for sale right around the corner, but looking at it, I don't see how you could possibly ever build on it. It looks like a drainage ditch at the bottom of a hill. I'm going to be keeping an eye on that neighborhood, though. And land out on McCrory as well. I just really love this area. It's kind of like the city's best kept secret. Sure, it's safe and bland and suburban, but the lay of the land out here is just beautiful to me.
Chris is really bummed. Once I made my choice to agree to put in an offer, I sort of washed my hands of it. They were either going to accept our offer and our life was about to get a lot more complicated or they weren't and we could go back to doing what we were doing. I focused more on making lists for all the things we would need to do to our house to get it on the market in the coming weeks and growing increasingly anxious about just how much of those lists was going to fall on me to get done. Our agent felt like we'd have no problem selling, though he of course couldn't guarantee that. But our worst case scenario was that we didn't sell by the fall when people stop buying houses and we put it on the rental market which is apparently insane right now, with up to five applicants for every property if you price it right and rental prices easily paying for the mortgage and then some.
That's still not a terrible scenario and it's been hard to pull ourselves out of the house hunting/moving mindset. To make ourselves feel better, we're going to get our agent a gift certificate for he and his wife to have a nice dinner at City House. He took so much time with us. Meeting us at least four times in two weeks and spending the entire evening with us just about. Once to see the house the first time, then to see the house again and write our offer, then to come over and see what we might need to do to our house to put it on the market and talk about the possibilities there and finally to take us all over Williamson County looking at comparable houses to see what we could get for either the same price or just a tiny bit more (the answer is, on average, about 500 fewer square feet and a smaller yard, but you can't really compare it to a foreclosure that's priced $30k lower than it's worth). I want to tell him to keep us in the back of his mind if he finds a fixer upper in our price range in some of the areas we pointed out that we really liked. Or even better, some land we could build on.
There's five acres in Leipers Fork right now, but apparently there's so much rock, you can't install septic and it's not sewer accessible. So it's kind of useless for a home. The market is such that people are still hanging onto their land, waiting for prices to come back up. That was our original goal though. Get Jonah through school or mostly through school in this house. Then purchase a plot of land and begin paying it off while we're here. Then take our combined equity in our house and land to build. Sell, move, acquire goats and guns... profit.
But after a weekend in the yard, getting things put back together from six months of neglect while we worked on the floors inside, enjoying our somewhat private patio in our rather-large-for-suburbia yard which backs up to a tree line and a huge field instead of someone else's driveway, we feel a lot better about staying here and throwing ourselves into this house for the next 5 years and then seeing what happens. Still, it's tough seeing houses going in 30 days or less right now and realizing there are still amazing deals out there to be had (like this foreclosure was). This is like the sweet spot of the real estate market right now, where prices are still about 10% down from what they should be in a healthy market but houses are selling well in our particular area. It's kind of the perfect time to move for all the wrong reasons.
Even still, I really think we're better off staying here, continuing to build equity so we can make the move we really want to make. We would have been starting over on a 30 year mortgage when we had just refinanced on a 15 year last fall (no closing costs on that or we wouldn't have even been considering it). But it's tough to shake the possibilities.
Since then, I've purchased a bunch of stuff to work on drapes for the rooms I never got around to before Jonah was born (which is all but his room an ours). I've made a list of every single project that stands unfinished around the house (it is embarrassingly long). Finally caulked the front door we installed like three years ago (the penis jokes were infinite). Cleaned out three of seven gardens. And I'm meeting with painter number three this morning to see if she'll give me a price I'm willing to pay to have all these high walls and ceilings painted that I'd really rather leave to a professional with insurance. This instead of a quote to come in with a team and do the entire interior in something neutral so we could put it on the market (because right now, there's nothing neutral about it).