Off to California today! Indy’s coming with me, because I thought it would be fun for him (airplanes, warm-weather playgrounds, beaucoup sushi, etc) and much less fun for Goldie, who is generally the easiest baby ever but who is possibly slightly less easy when jet-lagged; I don’t know, but I decided that a heavily-itineraried trip would not be the best time to experiment. (She’s staying home with an on-spring-break Kendrick, who will be the recipient of ten thousand photos of kitchens and living rooms from all across the South Bay area over the next five days.)
First up: a couple of days in San Francisco with Morgan, and then it’s off to San Jose (which is sort of the nexus of all the areas we’re looking at) to spend a few days looking at houses. I think. The “I think” is because every house that I have found over the past week on various home-search engines that I don’t hate turns out to be sold already. Oh my god, there was this one house I came across – it was SUCH A DREAM (we’re talking soaring windows, unbelievable kitchen, amazing school system, skylit family room, views views views and a CHICKEN COOP, which is obviously the best thing I can possibly imagine) that I called my broker in a panic and said “put an offer on it! Sight unseen! I don’t care!” Her reply? “…It sold for tens of thousands of dollars over the asking price. In about 24 hours.”
Greeeat.
The “hot market” that we’re experiencing at present, it appears, is quite wonderful when you are the one selling your house and perhaps slightly less wonderful when you are the one looking for somewhere to live.
So, my strategy: to work with our broker to check out houses in a variety of different neighborhoods, and to return home next weekend with a better sense of what areas we might like and what’s available in our price range. Of course, I’m also going to go ahead and hope that a miracle happens and we find something that we love and can afford and is actually still for sale when I see it, but since that’s got like a .00001% chance of happening, the second part of my strategy is to tour a couple of apartment complexes that offer month-to-month rentals. Because I suspect that what’s going to happen is that we’re going to drive out, stay in a temporary place (with rented furniture so we don’t have to move all our mess twice) while we house-hunt some more, and then move again at the end of the summer, assuming we’ve found a place by then.
Or at least that’s the plan. But what my last house-hunting odyssey taught me was that this kind of thing never, ever, everrrr goes how you expect it to. And usually that’s for the best…but even though I know that no matter how stressful this process becomes everything will work out in the end – or at least, you know, we will live somewhere eventually, and it will be fine – that doesn’t make it easy. Because it’s not just “me” in flux; it’s us. The decisions we’re making right now are going to change it all, and when you’re running headfirst into a place you can’t even imagine (not to mention taking your children with you into all that Unknown)…it’s a scary thing.
Somewhere around the middle of the series of bidding wars that we lost when we were searching for our first home, I wrote this:
I’m sort of surprised by how sad I am. I mean, I didn’t even know that this property existed a month ago…but now I’ve spent a few weeks thinking about it, and filling the rooms with our things, and imagining a whole life for us between those walls. It’s less that I’m mourning the loss of the house than it is that I’m mourning the loss of the memories that I had imagined us making – memories that haven’t even happened yet. So of course the fact is that what I’m mourning is a fantasy, and nothing that should really be mourned at all. But still.
So sure, you can know that things will work out, but still.
Still.
It’s so hard to remember that when all you want is to peer through the clouds for a glimpse of what might be sitting there in your future.
See you on the other side of the country.
