...who would seem Dimly to have made out my secret place, Only to lose it when he pirouettes," -- Robert Frost, from "Waiting"Everything is hinging on the appraisal. Which could happen today (yesterday?) or in three weeks. Blech.
So we had inspection today, which went pretty much as expected. Things are solid, except for the roof, which gives everybody a bit of pause. I took a lot of pictures, but the place is still so full of the current owner’s effects that I’m not at all comfortable putting them on the intertrons.
–Rita Dove, from “Vacation”
Lest it appear that all we’ve been doing is house-related:
Shakespeare (1), india ink, pencil, micron. Depending on which text you consult, “brindled” is also “brinded.” Can you find the sort-of hidden name of the play?
Shakespeare (2), same media, with Sunday afternoon lighting. And Stumptown.
My plan is to do one of these for each of the plays. I’ll need to vary the scale to make them group-able (we are buying a cottage, not a manse). A project to keep me busy for quite some time.
P.S. Officially on vacation now.
It’s a very different place we find ourselves in. Last night, really all of yesterday, but especially last night crossed right over into the surreal. What we knew was this:
–we had fallen real hard for the house
–the house had many suitors
–we had wooed her with all of our available resources (lest you think we went totally mad, but “all” I mean”all that we had predetermined we were okay with committing to)
She was a real beauty, with a front and back yard so nicely tended and cultivated we referred to it as grounds. Lovely exposed woodwork and 1930s tile fireplace and a bay window-ed dining room and spaces for all sorts of business and pleasure. And a smaller version of one of these in the kitchen. A real Frau Totenkinder of a cottage, a block away from several places where we have learned to enjoy ourselves.
I’d eaten half a bottle of Tums between Sunday when we met her and Monday evening when we wrote our offer. We knew our offer would be sixth to come in. We also knew we had nothing further to give, so I wrote a letter to include with our offer, not a plea, but an appeal. Nothing smarmy or cloying.
We asked to be informed by Wednesday morning. We knew the seller would review the offers Tuesday morning. Then, early Tuesday:
–many an email was shot off between our broker, agent, & jmags & myself. dotting is & crossing ts.
–HGTV asked us to reenact our offer Tuesday pm, since they couldn’t make it Monday.
–Frau Totenkinder disappeared from the online MLS site
–I reluctantly but doggedly went back to searching for new listings
–our agent didn’t return any of my emails (very unlike him)
We decided we were being set up. HGTV & our agent already knew what the seller had decided and they wanted to surprise us after they filmed our reenacted offer. I went so far as to select backup solid-colored dresses in case we had to pretend a day had gone by. When the crew, and then our agent, arrived, they all acted so damn cool that I was doubly suspicious, but I was convinced the offer had failed and they wanted a tragic backstory of loss caught on tape. We set up the reenactment, framed around the table, but when the cameras rolled, instead of going back over our offer, our agent said something like:
“I have news from the seller. There were a total of nine offers. Several of them were over asking price. The seller’s agent called all of the potential buyers back to see if they wanted to amend their offers, and some did. But the seller chose YOU.”
At which point I don’t really remember how I behaved. I think my eyes were very big. There was this incredibly bright light from the camera crew, and I know I kept looking back and forth between jmags and sylvia, and making small gaspy noises. It’s all on tape, so I guess eventually I’ll be able to fill in my memory. In the moment, it was difficult to believe that it could be real, because the camera crew made everything seem like make believe.
Everyone, the film crew, our agent, and obviously the three of us, were elated. It is a marvelous house, and we are incredibly fortunate that no one made an offer closer to its real value. I feel very fortunate. Incredulous, and very fortunate.
So I guess when things were all “starting somewhere” that “somewhere” turned out to be quite a bit further along than we’d been expecting. As I mentioned in the previous post the place we were the most fond of turned out to be pretty popular, so we went big on it. Fortunately, this seems to have been sufficient, as we’re now under contract and doing incredibly exciting things like scheduling inspections and figuring out what physical location we need to travel to with our earnest money (I guess we can’t be all living in the future all the time.)
At any rate, we’re probably going to be over there on Tuesday, and we’ll probably end up with lots of pictures at that point.
