Our House

For the past month or so, Ashley and I have been doing the househunting thing. It's a process that practically begs to be blogged about, but between actually looking for a place, trying to educate ourselves about the process, attending a couple more weddings, and struggling to beat the learning curve at my new job, I just haven't found the time to write a post about it.

And now, it's too late. Last Tuesday, we made an offer on a place, and by Wednesday evening, after a bit of back-and-forth, we were officially under contract. Today was the inspection, and everything went swimmingly. Aside from a couple of small repairs that need to be made, the house is in great shape, which is good news considering it was built back in 1987 (I know that's not that old, but you should've seen some of the other late-eighties places that we saw).

During the first couple of weeks, we saw a lot of houses, and we hated a lot of houses. Typically we'd pull into a neighborhood, and it would feel wrong even before we saw the house under consideration. After looking at a few places, our agent came to understand that my opinion of a house could be gleaned from my facial expression upon walking in the front door. Ashley was more charitable, but out of the 25 or so houses that we saw in person and the hundreds that we viewed on the web, there were only two we would consider living in, and we had quite a few reservations about those. Those mixed feelings were rendered moot, however, as those two places were snatched up within days of our viewing them. It seemed that our differing preferences and the housing market itself would take a long time to be reconciled.

And then one morning, while leaving yet another uninspiring home, Ashley and our real estate agent stumbled across a quaint little place that was for sale by owner. The owner was outside doing yardwork and agreed to show them around the place. I toured it the next day, we drew up an offer the following afternoon, and we were on our way.

As anyone who's been through the process knows, it doesn't take long to figure out what you want, what you're willing to live with, and what you absolutely can't abide. We knew pretty quickly what we wanted, and we recognized it when we finally saw it in this house. It's in an older neighborhood, built when trees and varied facades were still in vogue, and it's got a nice-sized yard with quite a bit of greenery and privacy. It's two-story, four bedrooms, two baths, some hardwood floors downstairs, front porch, with a screened porch out back. No garage, but there's a fairly spacious storage shed around the side. But as much as we like the house, I'm almost more excited by the location. It's in Durham and not far from I-40, so it'll shave 15-20 minutes off my commute and 20-25 minutes off Ashley's; there's a shopping center within one mile that has a nice Italian place, a Mexican place, and a pub; it's in a neighborhood that has a 12-mile network of jogging trails; and, best of all, the entrance to the neighborhood intersects the American Tobacco Trail. I can hop on my bike, hit the trail, and be in downtown Durham within half an hour, which we means that we can now bike to Durham Bulls games, The Regulator, and Elmo's. And several of our good friends live just a couple of streets over.

Assuming everything continues to go according to schedule, we should be moving in at the end of August. There are no pictures on the web, but we took quite a few during the inspection today, which you can see by clicking on the picture above. They're clearly not of professional quality, and the place was a bit messy, as the current owners have a two-year old and are in the midst of moving to Tennessee, but they'll give you a good idea of what we're so excited about.