**Le sigh**

Ok, so on whatever day that was that we were supposed to hear back from the lawyer/bank/realtor, we did. They countered at $149,000 which was, well, basically the original listing price. (Ok, so they knocked off $900. How generous.) We thought they were being pretty ridiculous seeing as how the house wasn’t even done so we decided to reject the counter and just move on. In all honesty I’m glad it didn’t work out. Even though I wouldn’t have been doing the work, it was a big thing to take on and I would have been annoyed by the lack of grass.

In any case, last night we had two appointments. One was to look at the house over on Byrd that I had gone to the open house for a few weekends ago. The second was for another house over by the park that we had originally booted from the list because its taxes were relatively high. In general Adam liked the house on Byrd and saw much of the same potential that I had. Then we went down into the basement and discovered a puddle of water and crack in the wall. That wasn’t there when I looked at the place two weeks ago! Oh well. It was in a really random place and we figure the neighbor’s directing their downspout right at the yard and there’s a slope under the deck, leading to seepage.

Adam used Jill (our friendly GPS) to find the second house although I thought that was kind of unnecessary since it’s one block from where I lived that one summer in college. (Aah, memories…) We pulled into the driveway and Adam commented that it looked nice. After taking a look around he decided to call his parents in for some additional opinions and his dad’s eagle eyes for potential faults. We had some fun with the safety lock on the patio door (as in, we couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t lock, Jim, the realtor, tried to use some silicone stuff from the basement, and then Adam found the instructions printed on the door, locked it, and then pranked his dad when they arrived) while we waited. After his parents arrived they did the tour and spent some quality time in the basement. Adam and his dad proceeded to try and break the garage door. All in all, it’s a nice place with lots of good qualities. The only things Adam disliked were the fact that the master bedroom is painted pink (ok, ROSE) and there’s this awkward divider mini wall thing in the kitchen area. Other than that, no complaints. Good sized rooms, two bathrooms, nice fireplace, great back yard including a deck complete with a grill bump-out, room in the basement for a workshop area and plenty of space on the breaker thingamajig (whatever that means…)

So, I think by this time you can guess what we did. We invited the realtor to our apartment for some wine and had him write up the offer while he was there. Heh. We just didn’t feel like driving up to Appleton and since their systems are all web-based we could do it this way. He faxed it over this morning and the seller’s realtor said she’d be talking with them this afternoon. I’m getting to be a pro at the offer paperwork. Don’t even need to read most of it anymore. Just check some numbers and dates and we’re good.

There’s just one potential problem. Doesn’t there always seem to be a problem?

Ours is a secondary offer as there’s an offer already on the place with a contingency that the buyer sells their current home. There’s a 48 hours bump clause in the contract wording and it’s likely things might work out. If the seller accepts our offer (or counters, although I think our offer was reasonable…and then we accept it) the other people have 48 hours to remove the contingency from their offer or we get the house. Jim says it’s very unusual that people remove the selling contingency but I guess we’ll have to wait and see what happens. In any case, we won’t know for sure about anything until next week.

We’re hoping that perhaps, for us, the third time is the charm.