Excited and scared pantsless!

We made an offer on a condo yesterday. It was all very sudden, but I really felt like fate had lined it all up perfectly.

In the past, when Jess and I had discussed where we wanted to live in Austin if we just had our pick without any considerations, there was a specific little area we both really thought was convenient and nice. Recently as our lease came up for renewal on our apartment, we had begun discussing the possibility of looking for a house or something in nearish future. Possibly within the next year maybe. Because of this we went ahead and had them draw up a seven month lease instead of our usual 12 month lease. They put it on our door, and it promptly went into the pile of flotsam on my desk. I kept meaning to sign and get it back to them but just hadn’t got around to it.
A month or two ago, I had collected the names of many recommended realtors from friends and co-workers in preparation for our search. On Friday I sent one of the realtors an introductory email to get in touch with me to start learning this whole process. I decided on a whim to look on Austin Home Search, just to get an idea of what was out there. I knew that the “idea” area Jess and I had picked was probably not very likely as it was too close into town and a nice area so probably pretty pricey. Just for the hell of it I decided to search it to get an idea of what prices were in that area. I searched for only “active” properties meaning that they didn’t already have any offers on them, and put in the other things we were looking for. One property came up. It was a condo. Dead center of the exact area we had always theorized we wanted to live in. It was just at the very top of the theoretical price range which I had randomly pulled from the air, guessing at what we might afford. The pictures made it look fabulous, but often real estate pictures lie.
By the end of Friday the realtor I had contacted had not got back to me yet. I figured it was because this was a holiday weekend and she had probably gone out of town early or something. Feeling antsy, as if this might be something we needed to jump on, I emailed the agent listing the condo just to see if we could take a look at it and see if it was as perfect in person as it seemed online. She emailed me back Friday night at about 10:30 with her cell number and said to call her to arrange it.
Saturday, I got up about at about 11:30 to enjoy our relaxing three day weekend. Jess started making breakfast and I called the condo realtor about 11:45. She was near the condo and could show it to us at about 12:30 if we wanted. Perfect! We quickly ate, and rushed to check it out. When we walked into the condo it just immediately felt like home. It was immaculate, large, well layed out, and just generally awesome. The place is already hardwired for ethernet, so there’s no running cables, just ethernet jacks in the walls to plug into. The current owners (who still live there but were out of town and looking to move into a bigger house as soon as they can sell) had also installed a security system in it. The more we learned about the owners, the more we and the realtor became kind of amazed by how much the current couple seems to be a lot like us. Everything was pretty much arranged and customized exactly how we would have done it. There was a “command central” room with tons of computers, monitors, printers, tech stuff. He had wired the place for ethernet. He’s also a musician. The place felt really solid too. You certainly didn’t feel like the occupants below you would be bothered by you walking across your floor/their ceiling as is the case in many apartments. The floor felt like a nice, solid slab. We were damn near ready to make an offer right then. The realtor was incredibly cool and no pressure at all. In fact she was more comfortable if we went and looked at some other possibilities first before jumping into it just so that we wouldn’t have any regrets later.
We went back to her office and pulled up everything available in various areas of Austin which we might consider. We narrowed about 60+ listings down to about 14 top contenders that may possibly interest us. We then left, plugged the addresses into the Prius and let the GPS system guide us to each house to determine if they were worth checking out further with the realtor on Sunday. We threw 3 of them our and emailed 11 to the realtor to look at the next day. After also running some errands, and not having eaten since noon, we finally got around to eating again at about 8:30 that night.
Sunday came and we met the realtor to go view th remaining properties on our list. By the end of it we had pretty easily dismissed all of them. We kept one condo in mind as a possible second option, and one house which was really nice, but unfortunately in an area which was highly questionable. The immediate street was fine, but the surrounding area was much less nice, and according to statistics I looked up, had about triple the crime numbers as the area we currently live in (and will still be living in if we get the new condo). At the end of another long day, we went back to the first condo, and it still felt right and wonderful. We went back to the office, drew up the paperwork and made an offer of the hugest sum of money I’ve ever contemplated in my life.
I was a bit stressed about how much this might stretch our finances to their limits, but at the same time I felt like buying a residence would always be scary and this was so perfect we would be fools not to jump at it. There was one other offer through another agent which would be presented simultaneously with ours, but we learned that we most likely had the edge when the owner called the realtor while we were doing our paperwork and apparently wasn’t real fond of dealing with the other agent, and that if our offer was even close to the other, they would rather go with us (we offered the asking price, rounded up about $250). When I got home and was still wondering if we might be stretching too far, I looked up a “How Much Home Can You Afford?” calculator, and the figure it presented me was about $1000 more than what we had just offered.
There are not enough good things to be said about this place. The only deficiencies we could find were that it was upstairs (which is good for security, but bad when you have to haul a guitar amplifier to and from gigs), and that there is no external space that’s all your own except the fairly small balcony. This means that there is no place for Jess to use as a workshop for projects which are not “inside” projects. We both decided that this was acceptable in view of how much everything else totally rocks. There are additional “Home Owner’s Association” fees every month, and normally Jess and I are pretty Anti-HOA, but in this case it’s not so bad. Since it’s a condo there’s not as much wacky exterior customization that we’d really want to do like we might in a house (such as painting weird colors, giraffe sculptures in the yard, or other things that homogeneous HOAs tend to frown at) and as a benefit the HOA takes care of all exterior maintenance so we never have to worry about the roof, exterior paint or repairs, etc.
The condo had only just been re-listed at this new lower price so I seem to have stumbled upon it on the first day it was re-listed, which seems to be very lucky as all evidence leads me to believe this thing would be gone within the week if not within a few days.
I just keep telling myself that everything always seems to work out as it should, and I’m sure this will too. Of course this means that we are both firmly entrenched in our jobs and quitting to chase my artistic dreams will not even be a option any more, but that’s another issue altogether…
So today we are enjoying the final day of our three day weekend (after having the other two completely consumed) and contemplating the possible new adventure. We are excited, frightened, and pretty overwhelmed by this massive and sudden turn of events. Then again, we’re the same people who just moved to Austin 2 years ago with no jobs and no savings. I’m sure it will all work out for the best…[nervous laughter]