Rinse, Lather, Despair

Perhaps the most wearing, and wearying, aspect of househunting is the cycle of hope, disappointment, and having to start all over again.

So, we made an offer on the house. The sellers made a counter -- too high for the area, we thought. We pondered our finances and the alternatives and decided to make a counter to the counter offer. And then we waited for another response. Which came, last Tuesday. They sold the house to someone else. We were apparently being used as leverage against another bid, one we were never told was out there. Arguably, we were never in the running at all, unless we were willing to pay over market.

We were not willing to pay over market -- we can't swing the loan if the appraisal comes in under selling price, which it well might. So we wouldn't have bid much higher anyhow. Still it's disappointing.

It's not as disappointing as it could be, because disappointment appears to be the primary feature of the househunting process, and so I've gotten a bit used to it. There's a larger pattern to it -- start with what you feel are modest goals, discover your error, recalibrate and diminish expectations, wrestle with trade-offs, decide you can live with the trade-offs, wait, hope, wait, and finally get the bad news. Then you recalibrate your expectations downwards, broaden your search criteria again, and start all over. Repeat when necessary.

Happily, just after I got the news I had a birthday lunch date with marykaykare who swept me off to the Salmon House in her jaunty new yellow convertible. There we had a grilled salmon lunch that couldn't be beat, enjoying the sunshine and the views across the water and a very nice chat. Just the thing for househunter's blues. Especially with the ginger spice birthday cupcake reserved for mid-afternoon dessert.

Later in the week, once Hal and I had pulled ourselves up off the emotional floor, we went out and looked at a couple of other houses in the same Kentish neighborhood. One shows very well -- it's been redone out from the studs, and the fit-and-finish is all good -- but it's tiny, and the space is laid out badly. Pity. The west-facing kitchen gets wonderful light, and the garden is well kept. But it's the sort of house that's ideal for the seller -- a single woman with not very much stuff. That would not be us. Wonderful light though. Still, crossed that off the list.

Now we're gearing up to maybe put in an offer on the other place we saw.

It is not the house of my dreams. It's post war, and very boxy, with a crying need for new paint, new kitchen linoleum, new appliances, and a ton of work on the garden. But because it's post war, it's built like a tank. And because it's boxy, every single major room on the main level has natural light on two sides. And because the garden has been allowed to do its own thing for years and years, it also has two mature apple trees and a mature pear, in among the dandelions. A person could do worse.

And whatever you say against it -- it's not very photogenic at the moment, for instance -- at least the house is not Yet Another Gottverdamter Mid-level Entry Ranch-style Rambler. Hates them, we does.

And, for a wonder, most everything about the house is original -- original scuffed and mellowed hardwood floors; weird, original metal-frame windows, original cedar lining on the linen closet, original weird, radiant heat furnace thingy. Yeah, okay, original is not always a plus.

In all, it's in an area we like, "well-priced" as the phrase goes, and a house we can live with. So we'll try again, put in an offer, and see what happens. What's the worst that could happen?

We repeat this cycle of diminished expectations until we wind up buying a cinderblock doghouse in Tacoma, that's what.

Werdz, Polonius, Werdz

Writing fiction, at least when I do it, is a matter of visualizing a bunch of counterfactuals, some of them wildly improbable or utterly alien, considering the consequences and connections of those, and making decisions based on them. Over and over. House hunting, at least when I do it, is just the same. House hunting uses the exact same part of my imaginative brain that writing normally uses.

Because, however much they tell you not to mentally move your stuff into a prospective house before it's bought, I can't not do that. If I don't visualize how the crap will fit in the space, how do I know that come moving day we won't need to disassemble a window and rent a duck hoist to get the furniture in? I gotta think that stuff out before hand. With the net result that I wake up spontaneously from a sound sleep with the dream-processed realization that the house on Prospect has no closets. Even my sleeping brain has been roped into this project.

So the silence you hear is me not typing. Zero words per day, day in, day out. It's been like that pretty much since I started the house hunt. And so, in part, I would like the house hunt to be over, not just because it's disappointing, but because I need that part of my brain back someday.