We Have a Winner (We Hope)

Well, we may be nearing the end of the househunting journey. I sure hope so. As has already been reported, I spent about eight hours on Saturday looking at about ten or twelve house, narrowing our list down to four finalists.

Last night, I went back and visited each one on my own. This turned out to be an extremely helpful exercise as it gave me a much better idea of drive times and the neighborhoods. At each house, I walked the surrounding streets. I was able to get a better sense of the area. For instance, for the Greythorn home, I realized that the neighborhood was a little isolated and that many of the homes were kind of "bare" with regard to trees.

In any case, I narrowed it down to two places . . . the two that really have been at the top of our list since I came out to look at houses in May: Oakbriar and Chiswell Run.

This afternoon, our realtor and I visited those two homes again and really looked at them in great detail. First we went to Oakbriar. Again, it struck me as just very beautiful and classy. There really was nothing at all wrong with it. By comparison, my second look at the Harbour Bay house just exposed a lot of faults in it and showed it wasn't a good value. (Turned out that it didn't matter anyway as we learned today that it is ready to go into foreclosure and so it's not an option because banks don't respond to offers very fast.) The neighborhood again seemed very nice and I even got to talk to some of our potential neighbors. In other words, we drove away thinking that it was still a very viable choice.

From there we went to the Chiswell Run house. When I visited there last night, I was reminded that it is on a fairly busy, narrow neighborhood street . . . not like a city street but not as quiet as the other homes. But I also took time to walk some of the walkways that crisscross the neighborhood behind and between all the houses. (One weird thing . . . the house behind us has four dogs but they all have really hoarse barks, like they've had their vocal cords removed or something.) Anyway, it's a very different type of setting when compared to other places we've lived. There were lots of kids out playing in their backyards and riding bikes on the paths and adults sitting on back decks and mowing their lawns. Jeannette had said that this was really appealing to her but until I walked around, I didn't get it myself.

Touring the house today, it wasn't as pristine and perfect as Oakbriar but it was very nice. Interestingly, while there are a few more "rough spots" in this house--little things that ought to be touched up to make them "right"--I don't think we would have to spend any money to get it ready to move in while the Oakbriar could require some new carpeting.

Well, Chiswell is the choice. Basically, it boiled down to several things:

• It is very close to Blackhawk Christian School (about a seven minute drive) and not too far from TUFW (20 minutes max). There have to be at least ten churches within ten minutes, too, to choose from.
• The walkways are really cool.
• At the risk of sounding like a senior citizen prematurely, I realized that if we end up staying in this house for 20 or 30 years, it could be very nice to have everything we would need on the main floor of the house so that we didn't have to worry about stairs.
• Theoretically, we might be able to expand the half-bath on the main floor to a full bath.

The capper, though, was the neighborhood association itself. I knew that there were recreation facilities and stuff but hadn't seen them and didn't expect them to amount to much. Well, we looked around a bit and it turns out that the association has a number of tennis courts, a nine-hole par 3 golf course, two swimming pools and a wading pool, and a clubhouse with pool tables, racquetball courts and a room where events can be held.

When Jeannette told me there were two pools, I was kind of like "yeah, a couple of plain ol' pools behind a chainlink fence, whatever." I was pleasantly surprised when I saw the pool area. It was staffed with two or three lifeguards plus a couple other workers (Jordan, maybe you can get a job there someday!) and the pools are very nice. One has competition lanes and two diving boards. There are lounge chairs around the pools. So while I personally really couldn't care less about swimming pools, they are something that the rest of the family will really use and enjoy . . . at least for the three months or so that they're open each year. So the pools kind of "sealed the deal" for me.

We put together an offer tonight and the seller has until noon on Thursday to respond. The Oakbriar house is still a great option if Chiswell doesn't work out, but I'm pretty excited about this place.

Now . . . to sell our house in Oregon . . .