what a weird blog post to write, but i thought it would be worth sharing that we briefly went into escrow on a house and then decided to pull out. i think the moral of the story has to be to trust your gut, and as a girlfriend put it — if it’s not a HELL YEAH, then it shouldn’t be a yeah.

in a strange turn of events, we made an offer and it was actually accepted!!! we had some concerns, but in our history of house hunting, we assumed we wouldn’t get it anyway so we may as well make an offer since it had a lot of things we were looking for.

a VIEW!!! a beautiful mountain view with a private backyard that felt like it could become a magical little oasis for us. it had a really nice layout for us, a split level (which i know a lot of people don’t like but i do) so it had a nice big family room downstairs, with a living room/dining room and kitchen on the main floor and the bedrooms on the third floor. it also had a little cabin in the backyard where gid could work. and great schools!!

but there were things we really didn’t like too. it had a shared driveway and was tucked behind another house, i’ve heard thats a selling point for some people because of the safety and privacy, but it felt sad that we wouldn’t be able to have trick or treaters or decorate the exterior of our house and things like that.

the bedrooms were all on the small side, and you couldn’t see the view from what would have been our bedroom, only the kids rooms for some reason. not a huge dealbreaker for some, but i am a bed person. i work in bed, chill in bed, the moment arlo goes to sleep we watch tv in bed— i am not a sofa person. so for me, i now realize that i have to love whatever bedroom i end up in because i’ll be spending a lot of time there!

and there were little things, like you couldn’t see the backyard from the kitchen. i’ve always fantasized about being able to watch arlo and our future kid play outside while i cook dinner and the idea of having some beautiful backyard i couldn’t see from there made me sad! a bunch of little things that weren’t fixable.

the location was also a scary change, it was in an area that we’ve always loved, but up higher than we hoped and the exact location of it felt really far away from what we’re used to and isolating. and if we do end up with a newborn, the last thing i want to feel is even more isolated from loved ones.

its a tricky situation because we want a house that we can fix up, but we also felt overwhelmed by the laundry list of what we’d have to do to this one to make it great. if it had had something visually desirable inside, i think it would have felt closer to what we wanted, but when i started going through the giant laundry list of what i’d have to do to every single room in the house, it felt really overwhelming. popcorn ceilings AND carpet to tear out?! and maybe our perfect house will have just as much to do, but maybe it’ll be ever so SLIGHTLY less!

of course i know that no house will be perfect and we’ll always have to make compromises. and i shouldn’t/can’t plan for our next house to necessarily be our forever house, but i definitely do want it to feel like its our house for the foreseeable future versus one we’d fix up and want to sell!! 

and maybe if it comes with a pool or vaulted ceilings we’ll have one of those things we wanted.

and on a personal note, on top of everything the timing was so overwhelming, my hysteroscopy was coming up and christmas was weeks away, so when we decided to pull out, we felt more relief than sadness, which is hopefully a sign that we made the right choice.

anyway, i still totally want to move– but at the end of the day, we’re happy and settled in our house and don’t want to settle. hoping our house is out there soon!!