Welcome to Part 3 of the series in which we chronicle our journey selling our house.
In Part 1, we talked about getting some bad news on (what we hoped would be) our next home. Part 2, we discussed the reason we think the house hasn’t sold yet. Today, I’m going to lay out what (we think) our options are at this point…. And there are a few.
So starting off, after the other house sold, the big question we had to ask ourselves was “Do we still want to move?” We’ve surprisingly wavered quite a bit on the topic lately. Mainly we hope to have another child soon, Wills Casa Dos only has 3 bedrooms means that my office will get displaced once we need another nursery. I work from home often, and I need a quiet place to get work done. It’s more of a layout issue than anything. The house is just under 3000 sqft, which should be plenty of room for 4 people. It’s comes straight down to the number of bedrooms. We could move the office into the master and still have room for Amber’s craft corner in there, but I’d rather not work where I sleep.
I feel like moving is the logical next step for us still. The problem is that we don’t know where we would move if our sold now. After a lot of late night conversations (which never ended up nearly as romantic as I would have hoped), we basically decided that we have 3 main options at this point:
Downtown Fort Worth ain’t too hard on the eyes. (via)
1. Wait for something in a neighborhood we like to pop up – This one definitely requires the most patience. The problem is we need our house to be sold, or at least under contract until we feel comfortable making an offer on another. The neighborhoods we like (near downtown Fort Worth) generally sell extremely fast, so we need the ability to strike quickly once another house we love pops up. The problem is the limbo time between our house selling and another one that we love popping up. Who knows how long that could take. It may never happen! (Ok, so that was a bit over dramatic)
Could we build a house like this for around $37k? Stop laughing, I was serious. (via)
2. Buy some land, hire an architect and build something wonderful – This one is really intriguing to me, but is the one that we’ve pursued the least of the three. If we did build, we would probably skew a lot more modern than in any other cases. Clean lines. Walls of windows. You guys know the drill. The problem is that neither of us have any idea of the ballpark cost for us to build something that we’d love. It may not even be a viable option once we get a quote.
Maybe we’ll just live out of one of these guys for a little while. (via)
3. Do something crazy – This is where it really starts to get interesting. Amber and I have been throwing tons of ideas into this bucket. All of them exciting, none of them conventional. What if we bought an airstream and just lived in it for a year and traveled around the country? Took an old barn and converted it into a place for us to live (a la Sarah’s House)? Move somewhere completely different for a couple of years (probably not that crazy for most, but most of our family is here and we have no real reason to move other than being spontaneous)? Or something crazier? All of these sound like a lot of fun. All of them are a little crazy. We’re still pretty young (I’m 27. Amber’s 28.) and if we were to do something like this, now would be the time.
So stepping back from the situation and evaluating our list of options as best I can, my answer to the earlier postured question “Where do we go from here?” would be a simple shoulder shrug and a mumbled “uh…not sure.” And I think I’m okay with that.
The first order of business is getting our house sold. After that, we’ll look at all the research we’ve done on these options (it will probably be a ton by them) and figure out what works best and makes us the most happy. I’m not going to lie, operating without a plan is a bit frightening, but it’s also extremely exciting. It feels like we’re at a fork in the road with no wrong paths. We’ll just have to see where this thing takes us.
It’s been my DREAM to hire an architect and have a completely custom house built. But I’m leaning more on the “Do something crazy” side of life. Please buy a barn!
Yes it’s definitely something I’d love to do eventually, but I’m not sure I want to do it now. We are leaning more towards the crazy ideas. Figuring out how to logistics of it is proving to be about as out of our control as selling.
I love all your ideas. I am stoked about the airstream model
dh and I were actually just talking about getting an airstream and fixing it up last week. I would totally go for that. I also love the idea of building from scratch. I have done that once. It’s a fun process. A LOT of work, but you can really build some equity that way. And doing it before hitting 30 like dh and I did, is definitely the way to go. I am so excited for you!
The airstream is just an insanely out there idea Nick had. I love it, but ain’t no way I’m living in an airstream with a 3 year old and newborn AND 2 big dogs especially when I stay at home all day. I will file the idea under when the kids grow up. 😉
Building sounds like fun but I feel like it would be something we would have to stay in forever especially since we want pretty modern architecture. There isn’t much of a market in Texas for that or we assume there isn’t since you don’t see homes like that being built. We will see…
We built our house and it was less than I thought it’d be! Granted we went with an established builder and chose one of their plans instead of hiring an architect but if you found a reasonably priced one, it might work out to about the same price! The “crazy ideas” sound really cool though
North Texas is the land of the new build neighborhoods. My mother in law actually sells for a builder. No one is building anything in the style we want though, so it would have to be a custom job. Plus we would have to have a decent amount of land because of all the windows. I think we could build it at our price point as long as we don’t get crazy which we is always a concern. Nick is set on 1 particular architecture company, so that’s my main fear on things getting out of control quickly.
When you lose a house that you think is your dream house, you always find one better. This is a fact. You’ll just have to trust me on this. Love the house you’re in (I admit that’s hard to do when you are trying to sell it) and before you know it, you’ll find yourself in a house you love even more. You’re just gonna have to trust me on this!
I trust you, but what if our next house isn’t a house… Did I just blow your mind!?
Guess I should have said “home”! (How about an apartment in NYC?)
Oh lord! I don’t think that will be happening. Nashville…maybe. Just wait Shelley when you aren’t paying attention I’m going to pull a Gone Girl on you! 😉
O.K. Been in the house selling situation twice in my life. Our first house sold in 3 months. The second time it took 8 months and it was a long 8 months because Bill had already taken the job in Arlington and I stayed back with the girls in San Antonio. So most of the time it was me and a 4 year old and an 18 month old and we had to leave everytime the realtor called to say they wanted to show the house! Oh! And the house needed to stay clean, like a model home. Ha! You guys made the mistake of finding a house you loved before you sold yours. I think you should stop looking because if you find something else before your house sells (AND IT WILL) it’ll drive you crazy. Keep your house on the market and your options open. #3 Do Something Crazy sounds fantastic! Do it. You’re right, you’re in a situation at this time in your life where there are no wrong paths. You Go Guys! It’ll all work out.
Haha thanks for encouraging the craziness. You know there is a lot of it in this house!