A Day Late and a Dollar Short

Our next step was to find some place to build. Finding a home on the Internet is pretty easy, just go to any Realtor website, type in your criteria and you get listings from almost every single Realtor in the area. Some offer the option to search for land but I realized later that not all land listings are on these sites. So when I couldn’t find any land for sale in the areas we were interested in building, or when the land I found exceeded what I was willing to pay (read: was overpriced and I couldn’t afford) we started looking at other options. The option to buy and remodel was still on the table though for the reasons outlined previously it wasn’t our top choice. The second option was to tear down an old house in disrepair and rebuild.

One day I came across a home on a one-acre lot that was bank owned, a casualty of the real estate crash. It was a Cape Cod style house built in the 1950’s on a quiet cul-de-Sac and had already been on the market for over a year. So on a rainy weekend we called the agent on the listing who seemed a little put off that we were calling. He wondered why we didn’t have an agent of our own to take us through and told us that the house is in pretty bad shape. So we ended up calling my Father-in-law, who works in commercial real estate. He was able to get the information and lock code to enter the house and take us through.

It was a nice flat lot, the home had a nice slate roof, but it was in significant disrepair. Tiny postage stamp of a kitchen, a three season room with a leaky roof and a small pond of algae on the floor. A narrow, spiral staircase leading up to the second floor bedrooms made me wonder how any furniture would even make it to the second floor. A 'refinished' basement with a roof so low even I had to duck. It was perfect! We talked about it and a week later went through one more time and decided to put a bid on the house.

My father-in-law handled all the paperwork and one evening we got together, gave him a 'good faith' deposit and signed on the straight line. We decided to bid on the lower side with the rationale being that we were placing the bid on the land given that the home itself was in such poor shape.

Well, as fate would have it, the day before our bid came in, someone else bid on the house and his or her bid was a whole lot closer to the actual asking price than ours. Needless to say we were a bit disappointed but we had a set limit on what we wanted to pay and knew we were not going to get this property.

Boo Wife and I drove past the house not too long ago and it looks like the home was remodeled and people are living there again. In a way I’m glad, tearing down a house looks so cool on TV but it’s kind of sad when you think about it. Anyway, most of the time things happen for a reason...Right?

NEXT: Serendipity