Friday, October 17, 2008

Here We Go Again

I'd mentioned in 'blogapalooza' about the new house. I went to see it yesterday, and oh. my. It really is my dream house. If I made a wish list for the perfect house, this one would seem to be custom built from the list. It - literally - has everything I could want in a house.

It has four bedrooms; 3 full baths and 1 half bath; a formal living room, then a rec room with a stone fireplace on the first floor; and another rec room with another fireplace, and a wet bar, in the finished basement. It has a whole laundry room in the basement. It has a gigantic tiered deck off the back, an in-ground swimming pool (with pool house!), 2 acres (in the city!), and goes all the way back to the river behind the house. It's absolutely perfect.

I've actually wondered if it's "too much house" for us, if it's more than we need. But really - no. I don't think so. The four bedrooms is exactly what we need to finally have room. The first floor rec room is a perfect solution to my complaint of having all of us crammed into one tiny living room every evening, and the 'main room' of the house always being junked and cluttered up. We probably don't need the second rec room in the basement, but what we do desperately need is more storage - and we'd certainly have that. After living in this tiny Cracker Jack box of a house for 14 years, having that much space just makes my head spin. It would be heaven.

Yeah, the place is just perfect, and they've dropped the price on it to a level that's astounding for this house. I can't believe no one's snagged it before now, but I think they only recently - in the last few weeks - dropped the price this last time. But even so, it's still stretching the upper limit of what we can afford, and that makes me very nervous. I would love to have this house, but not if it takes every dime we make, and I have to worry every month about how I'm going to pay for it, or how we'd afford it if a repair or something needed done. I'm not sure it's that extreme, but ... well, figure it like this - the house payment alone would be double my current one, and then there's all the utilities being higher because the house is 3 times bigger than mine (plus the pool). It's a whole lot more than we're used to spending. And I know how easy it is for things to look good on paper, but not really work out that way in reality.

Well. I think I'll go to the bank today and talk to a loan officer and see realistically what our options are, first off. Find out how much mortgage we can actually get, and whether or not it's anywhere in the range we'd need to buy this house. That's probably a good starting place.

Meanwhile, there's also the issue of having to unload my house before we could officially buy a new one. That's a prospect I'm not looking forward to, not only because of the market, but because of how cluttered and junked up this place is, how much 'sprucing up' and work it'd need to put it on the market, and the now very short time frame we'd have to do all that.

But this house is so nice. I'll leave you with some pictures. I didn't take very many, I was too busy walking around in awe.




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