So. We sold our townhouse. Half our stuff was in storage. We had 60 days before we legally had to vacate for the other lesbians. It was time for some high quality real estate pr0n.
The criteria for our new place included:
- Room for a 2-fat-person home office
- A big enough primary bedroom for two fat queens in a king bed
- A fenced yard, ideally with enough room to one day put in a pool
- A garage to park our 2006 Saturn Vue, Chloe (after 11 years of street parking, she deserved it)
- No more than a 20 minute drive from the fam
- Walkable to amenities, because I STILL DON'T DRIVE I KNOW I KNOW
Inventory was low, gang, and prices were high as fuck and time was ticking down to "homeless o'clock" real fast. We expanded the location. We upped our budget.
Every day we'd scour the listings, desperately trying to make fetch happen with any house that remotely fit our criteria and budget, even if the house was in the middle of the highway or had big boulders in the basement. (This isn't the one we saw but it was VERY SIMILAR.)
"It's near the grocery store!" we'd say "So what if there's a sinkhole in the yard, it'll be fun for Pumbaa!"
Work continued to be busy and actually going to Victoria to look at houses was tricky, timing-wise, but we finally booked a date with our realtor Jane to tour some contenders. The day before we were leaving, she called and said every house we'd planned to look at had already sold. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAA blaaaaaarg 60 days tho
Thank goodness Jane was happy to FaceTime us through several houses. We love online shopping but there's nothing like having an actual human there to get a real sense of a place. We learned a lot during this process, such as:
- If your realtor takes one step in and says "This place smells like old people," don't buy the house.
- If the owner took out a wall and put in a support beam HIMSELF, without a permit, don't buy the house.
- If your realtor opens a closet and there's unexplained ductwork made of cardboard in there, don't buy the house.
- If the shower is so small that when your slim realtor gets into it, she says "Oh shit" and has trouble getting out, don't buy the house.
- If there's already a pool (yay!) but the property also includes a huge, abandoned-looking machinist shop and your realtor asks "What's in there?" and the other realtor makes this face:
Don't buy the house.
We put an offer on one house (the house in the picture at the top of this post) but wanted a home inspection (this was the support beam house, but in our defence, the layout was great and it was close to a mall).
The realtor used our offer to get the other buyers to up THEIR offer and they didn't ask for a home inspection or any other conditions, so they got it (I creeped this house while I was writing this post and it was sold again less than a year later for about $100,000 less than our rival buyers paid for it so hahaha SUCK IT.)
After more weeks of surfing the listings, we fell HARD for another house. The realtor video is still up, if you want to feast your eyes on this house we didn't get.
This one was a reach for us. To have ANY chance to get this place, we'd have to stretch to the barfy-times tippy-top of our budget. "If you really want this house," said Jane, "You could write a letter."
Letter-writing isn't really a thing here. And the idea of writing a cringe-y "please sell me your house in my budget, I feel a deep connection with your sunken living room" letter mades me want to scream pantsless while setting things on fire but we really wanted this house.
So I turned to my BFF Padu, because he and his partner Macr had not only written such a letter (it's a more common practice in Ontario) but had received such a letter when they bought a new house and sold their old house the previous spring and he kindly supplied me with both. I synthesized the two letters, added some personal details and a pic of our one-eyed rescue sharpei ("She was in a shelter in Korea for 18 months! She'd be so happy in your beautiful yard! BAAAARF I HATE MYSELF") and we made the offer.
Our realtor called and said "They loved your letter. But they have another offer. They want to know if you can go any higher."
We DEEPLY could not. So we didn't get the house.
But we found out later that the other offer was OVER $100,000 MORE THAN OURS and they still checked with us before going with the other offer! That's the power of the letter, gang.
We were about two weeks away from our move-out date. It was already November. Jane suggested maybe finding somewhere to rent in the interim. "There will be more on the market in the spring," she said soothingly, "your perfect place just isn't ready for you yet."
But the thing is...it WAS. And I had actually already seen it.
And now, a select 50X50 update:
5km walks: 3
French lessons: 2
Air fryer uses: 0
Meditation sessions but not while in bed trying to fall asleep: 1
Blog posts: 4
