You want what? Fine, we'll take something better

Well. It’s been a hectic couple of days, so hectic I was only able to squeeze in five hours of poker.
Which reminds me of one of the funniest quotes from Homer Simpson:
“I had to work two jobs and take care of Maggie and the other kids at home. It was tough, but somehow I managed to squeeze in eight hours of TV a day.”
But I digress, as usual.

We got the house.
We just didn’t the house we wanted at first.
But we may have gotten the house we wanted more.

On the first house, the owners counter-offered. Technically. Actually, their offer was about as funny as a donkey justifying why he was correct to call with his inside straight draw after you bet twice the pot.
We offered $5,000 off the list price and $5,000 in closing costs. Yes, with that kind of offer, you expect a counter.

They countered with full price.
Or we could pay $5,000 more and have $5,000 in closing costs.
And they wanted to close three weeks later than our move-out date.
And they wanted to put a contingency on that moving date that basically said if they didn’t find a home they liked before the closing date the deal was off.
My response was pretty simple.

“Have the realtor call us when they’re ready to sell the house.”

So that left us scrambling Friday to find another house, and sometimes, when you take a second look at something, the light shines much brighter, much like how when you take another look at how you played your set and realize that the guy had an uber-draw and it really wasn’t as big a suckout as you thought when you lost.

We initially dismissed a house we really liked because it seemed to be too expensive and it didn’t have a fence in the back. With our options limited — one of the homes we looked at Friday was decorated before the age of disco, with the golden yellow 60’s lava lamp wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom the highlight — we took another look at it.
And we fell in love.

The fence, we decided, could be built in the back, and Mom, God Bless her, instantly volunteered to help pay for it. Yes, the price was more than we wanted, but our payments would be about $100 more a month, and we would bargain them down a bit.

We offered essentially $7,000 off the list price and said we had to close Nov. 8.
Last night our realtors called with the good news: They signed the contract.

Sometimes things happen for a reason, as cliched as that sounds. We would have been happy with the first house, but we think we’ll be much happiera with the new one.

Packing feels like fun after the long struggle.
After three years, one more month, and it’s all over. Well, until Kate decides she wants to change something about the house. But that’s a new struggle. After three years, I’m ready for any struggle that’s new.