House Hunting

In my last post, I neglected to mention one of the new stresses in our life: we're house hunting.  When we moved to CU Land in 2008, we knew the town home we purchased would be a temporary home.  We had thought then, however, that we'd likely stay until Archer had tenure.  As we learned more about the school system, we learned we'd have to move sooner rather than later.  When I was first offered the full-time position at CU, we talked about moving.  At that time we decided it made more sense to stay where we are now and save up a larger down payment.  This meant, however, that we would enroll Wild Man in the French Immersion in the neighborhood we weren't thrilled with.  This also meant that Wild Man would likely change schools by the time he went into grade 2.  We weren't happy with this decision, but economically, it made the most sense.

A few weeks ago, Archer and I were in one of the two neighborhoods we'd love to live in.  This neighborhood is walking distance to CU, to the boys' daycare, and to the FI school we want the boys to go to.  I looked it up when we got home and found out it was affordable for this neighborhood (I say for this neighborhood because the homes in this neighborhood are, on average, $30,000 more than most of the homes in CU Land).  So after several long conversations, I called the real estate agent who helped us find out town home and made an appointment to see it.  The house turned out to be insulated with a formaldehyde based foam insulation, which cannot be easily removed, so we passed on this house.  But our agent came by and looked at our town home, and based on some key factors, she thinks we could get about $15 to $18,000 more than we paid for it, giving us a much larger down payment than we anticipated we'd have.  She also said the market for our neighborhood is really great right now.  Because ours is a small town home community in a nice part of town, retirees want to be in this neighborhood.  Not only are there no town homes for sale in our community, but there are only 3 for sale in this part of town, all listed at $20,000 over what we paid for ours.  So we've decided to put our place on the market.  Archer is in the process of finishing the floor trim in the kitchen, and we're going to touch up all the rooms we've already painted and paint the main floor.  Next week we'll go pick out carpeting for the top floor, and after we rearrange some furniture and pack up all our family photos (if you know me at all, you know that will be an arduous task as I have lots of family photos and that I will be a little sad not to have these things around me).  Then our place will go on the market.

That part will be the easy part.  The hard part--finding a house in our price range that doesn't need to be completely gutted in one of the two school districts we're interested in.  We've been looking, and we're slowly realizing this isn't going to be easy.