[NB: I started this post on 9/21 and then never finished it, but decided not to re-edit the whole thing] I've been holding off on posting anything because it didn't feel like it was going to really happen, but considering that I dropped off a very large cashier's check to our attorney this afternoon, it feels pretty real! I just looked at my bank account, and seeing it back to "normal" levels after the high-water mark of the last few weeks is actually kind of reassuring. Sean's mom decided at the end of July that she wanted to sell Concord Street, which precipitated our house search much earlier than we had planned, like, by more than a year. It was stressful since we knew the market was hot, even though we were as yet only dimly aware of how hot, but we also got incredibly lucky - and again, we didn't realize just how lucky until later.
One of our limitations was that we really wanted a house in Branford, which (because it's nice!) had fewer options than towns like Milford or North Haven. Our other requirements were central air and non-oil heat, and no raised ranches. We looked at a couple of houses with Linda and Gary, and after one of those visits we actually drove by the house we're buying, but since there was no For Sale sign, we figured it was off the market already. We knew we needed a realtor, and one of Sean's coworkers recommended the father of a former student, who is based in Branford and helped her buy a house. At this point we'd been "looking" for about a week. We met Steve on a Thursday, and liked him. We looked at a couple of houses on the computer together in his office, he explained the MLS system that he would get us access to, and at the end we asked about the "blue house," which was not in MLS because it was for sale by owner. He said he'd check on it. Saturday we went up to see a house in Hamden, which was, um, idiosyncratic (and confirmed for me what Sean had known all along: Branford or bust), and then back to Branford to see the blue house.
Reader, I loved it the second we walked in. Everything was immaculate and new, but not the cheap new of a flipped house (which after looking at listings, you can begin to spot even in the photos). It's a split level, which isn't a house style I ever thought we'd wind up in. There had been three bedrooms, but in the massive overhaul of the house, which was done when the current owners bought it, they moved a wall and turned the third bedroom into a massive walk-in-closet. This actually made is somewhat less desirable on the market because anyone with a family usually wants three bedrooms or more, but they only have 1 teen kid, so it had worked for them (and we have 0 kids, so it works for us too!). As we learned, they were selling because they had realized that the husband's father was going to need to live with them sooner rather than later, and there was just no room. They even apparently looked into building an addition (and space is not an issue, since the 1.75 acres, including pond, was actually the least desirable feature to me), but decided it would be less of a hassle to move. That's why everything was so wonderful and new; they'd overseen the replacement of everything from the roof to the central air just two years ago, expecting to stay long term. Obviously, this sucks for them, but it was amazing for us.
We were out in the backyard, looking at the massive shed, when I told Sean I wanted the house. He agreed, so we told Steve and he headed back inside to talk to Angela. We put in an offer a little shy of asking price the same night. We hadn't actually signed our representation agreement with Steve, nor had we gotten a mortgage pre-approval (though we quickly got that handled). We figured we were just starting out with looking, and everyone warned us it would take a long time to find a place we liked. Nope. After a small negotiation, we beat out the other offer, from sellers who were apparently offering more money but had less assurance of getting financing.
[Continuing today] We had offered a long close when we made our initial offer, since the sellers (Angela and Tony) needed to buy their own place. Making an offer at the beginning of August for a closing scheduled for 9/29 turned out to be an excruciating wait. Everything you read and everyone who's bought a home before warns you that anything can and will go wrong in the process, from the inspection to the appraisal to the underwriting, so there's little use in celebrating until you have the keys in hand. I will admit that I was also super neurotic about the reason that they were selling -- what if the father-in-law died suddenly (still a global pandemic, after all!) and our sellers decided they didn't need to move after all? Yes, my mind goes those places. Steve explained that the sale contract goes two ways, so they just couldn't decide not to sell at this point (without leaving themselves open to a lawsuit, anyway). I also had a dream that the kids slept over, went out during the night, and fell in the pond - my sister's perfectly laconic response was "they can't reach the locks. Also, they're afraid of the dark. You're fine."
We had the inspection, which I wasn't worried about, considering how new everything was and the level of care that had clearly gone into the house, and I was right! The inspector couldn't praise the quality of the work enough and had virtually no items to report. His biggest note for us was that the shed would need a new roof sooner rather than later. The next hurdle: the bank appraised the house at $14k less than what we'd agreed to pay. Steve explained that this was happening a lot, since the comps from sales months earlier hadn't yet caught up to the heat of the summer Covid market. Usually you ask the seller if they'll negotiate on the purchase price after a low appraisal, maybe meet in the middle, but our sellers told Steve that they'd had a cash offer from a NYC buyer who would take it sight unseen if we couldn't meet the price. Well, OK then. We know how fortunate we are in this - the down payment may have been our own savings, but knowing we could dip into what is still (until my 35th birthday next week) technically a "trust fund" made all the difference. Thank you, parents!
The final piece was waiting for the underwriting to be completed. I know from what I've read online that we had perhaps the smoothest experience possible under current conditions, and it was still frustrating. You send them a document they ask for and then have to provide it in two other slightly different ways to satisfy them...and then they ask for the original one again. But we have a 2.75% fixed interest rate and we got to closing without issues, so I really can't complain in the end! We were even able to move our closing up to 9/23. Closings in the time of Covid aren't as ceremonious as they used to be; instead of us, our agent, and the sellers all meeting with the attorney at once, it was just me and Sean in his office (which happened to be down the road from Linda). It didn't even involve a "presentation of the keys" - that had happened at the house, an hour earlier, as Angela and Tony walked us through everything before they left. It was really sweet, actually - Tony's focus was on all the mechanicals and the structure of the house, so he was telling us that the crown molding work was done so well there aren't settling marks, and if we need that kind of work we want to contact Frank Capuano, but we don't want Frank, he's terrible to deal with -- it's Frank Capuano's cousin who did the good work. Angela was impatient with his stories, but wanted to reiterate that everything had been cleaned. The house was basically spotless, but she apologized that she hadn't had time to polish the stainless steel in the kitchen because she'd already packed the cleaner, haha.
And with that, we're homeowners! Or as I like to say, considering the (terrifyingly large) 1.75 acres of property, including pond, that now is in my name: we're landed gentry.
