Offer made and accepted!

The Sunday before our wedding we had an appointment to see this house in Northfield Village. I wasn't crazy about the neighborhood, but M drove by and said he thought I'd really like it.

The minute we drove up to it, I knew I wanted it! We had talked about possibly making an offer if we liked what we saw inside, because we sure liked the outside, and the description sounded like exactly what we were looking for.

We went inside and were pretty impressed. Big, renovated kitchen. Hard wood floors. Wood trim. New windows. Built in 1925, which is about the age of home I wanted.

And the outside is charming. There's a big wrap around porch that spans three sides of the house. Two-car garage, and a shed. And lots of "mature landscaping" as the listing says. It really looks like a summer cottage.



So we went back to our agent's office and wrote out the offer. The next day we found out they accepted it, and we scheduled a house inspection to be done before our wedding.

Bump in the road

After we made our offer, we anxiously waited everyday for the seller to call us back. She had seemed ok with the price when we verbally made the offer. So when M finally got to talk to her, she hemmed and hawed about waiting on her lawyer, and waiting for other offers. This was two weeks after we made the official offer.

Later that week her lawyer writes up an agreement and faxes it to me at work. To me it is an affront to everything we’ve sent her. It’s a completely new agreement, says none of the things we wrote in on our offer, and has her original price listed, $30,000 more than we wanted to pay.

When M sees the offer he calls her and says this is not at all where we want to go and she blames her lawyer for filling it out wrong. At this point M tells her he’s not sure if we even want to pursue this anymore. It’s been 3 weeks since we put in an offer. She says to talk it over with me and let her know if we want to withdraw our offer.

We talked it over and decided we don’t really want the house for a number of reasons. I really wanted a pre-WWII home, this one was built in the 50’s. There’s a lot of work to be done to the wet basement, and electric work. The house is a ranch, and it’s on a busy street. And the seller doesn’t want us to work with a realtor, she wants us to her with her and her lawyer. There’s no way we’re going into this just on our wits alone. We’d have to hire a lawyer or retain our realtor out of our own pocket.

In the end we weren’t comfortable compromising so much for a house we weren’t in love with and withdrew our offer.

Made an offer

We decided to make an offer on the ranch from my last post. We are offering about $30,000 less than her offering price, because it needs a lot of work, including the basement which has been very wet each time we've been over.

The woman is selling the house For Sale by Owner as part of her grandfather's estate. She doesn't wants us to deal with her lawyer, no realtors, but of course we need someone experienced on our side, so we are working with our realtor.

Now we begin the waiting game!