Beacon Bound
Big news in the get donkey! world. Mrs. gd! and I just got back from our recon trip out east and we have found a house! We spent a couple of days looking in around in CT and NY. As I mentioned before, I was interested in looking at Beacon, NY, but it was more out of curiosity than anything else. We got to Beacon on Sunday morning and drove down Main Street. We immediately liked what we saw. Based on the available listings our Realtor had sent, however, we were not really expecting to find anything available that met our criteria and price-range. In fact, we had pretty much settled on a house we had seen the day before in Oxford, CT. About four houses into our trip, however, our Realtor drove us up in front of this great-looking, old house on top of a hill. It had been on the market for less than a day. As we went inside another couple was coming out. It was the first time on the entire trip that someone else was looking at the same house we were. We soon knew why. The house was beautiful inside. Everything we had wanted in our current Houston home was in this house. It far exceeded both of our expectations. Actually, it was the first house we looked at where I didn’t immediately come up with a mental punch-list of the things I didn’t like about it (Hey, I’m picky). The couple selling it was there, which I have since found out is a no-no with Realtors, but these people were so nice that it was an absolute pleasure meeting them and made the house even more attractive. It was obvious that they loved the place and had put a lot of themselves into restoring it.
After we were done looking, Mrs. gd! looked at me and said that we should suspend the house hunt, go back to the office and submit an offer. We did. We found out that there was another offer that had just come in (we suspect it was from the couple that was leaving as we arrived), so we would have to wait for the current owners to decide which offer they wanted to accept. Sunday night was suspenseful. In fact, I don’t think either of us slept much. The next morning we went up to Poughkeepsie to look around for some back-up properties. As the morning went on, we were getting a little more pessimistic about our chances. We called the Realtor and she hadn’t heard anything yet, so we asked her to schedule some appointments in Poughkeepsie. A few minutes later, the cell phone buzzed. It was the Realtor and she had good news. Our offer was accepted! We sat and cheered in our rented Malibu Maxx while the other folks in the strip mall parking lot stared at us. It was turning out to be the best Valentine’s Day in a long time!
Thanks to the kindness of the current owners and the, I don’t know, awesome-ness of our Realtor and her recommendation for an inspector, we had the house inspection on Monday evening. The next step is the contract (BTW, buying a house in NY state is a very odd undertaking compared to my experiences in TX and IL, but I’ll save that for another time).
Now we have to sell the famous casa del burro here in Houston.
For the first time I am really excited about the move.
