Six String wrote:I had the easiest house purchase back in the 80s. I was renting the house and the owner told me he wanted to sell the house and he was either going to sell it to me or someone else. So I bought it. I was happy, didn't want to move and the price was very reasonable. We shared the same agent! He offered, I accepted, we signed papers, it was over.
That sounds almost comically idyllic, like something out of an Enid Blyton book for grown ups.
I had fallen very hard for the house we went to see. It had a crazy, almost Scandinavian look to it, with lovely native Texas plants out front, huge old oaks all the way round. There was gorgeous greenery in the front windows, and out back a lovely old deck stepped down to a covering of ancient oak canopy from both our yard and the neighbours. To top it all, there was a treehouse, with a little ladder that you climbed up, and you could walk from tree to tree. Inside, the master bedroom overlooked all the oaks and it just ached with character. It was also, importantly, incredibly fucking cheap.
The house went on the market on Friday evening and we went to see it at 10:30am on the Saturday. We made an offer in the afternoon and spent all afternoon scrambling a contract together and writing a ridiculous letter to the owner and in my head, I had moved in. Our realtor called us at 8pm and told us they had accepted their first offer, which must have been stupendous because we thought our offer was fucking amazing. We spent the next few days trying to dissect what had happened, which felt very weird, and the house has been on and off the market about ten times in the past five years so God knows what is going on. I should know better than to get emotionally invested in a property but I was absolutely gutted.
Part of this has to do with the significance the ownership of a house has in our lives. We met in 2010, and our lives flipped around. I abandoned (with no regrets despite how emotive the word "abandoned" sounds) everything I had to move to the US so we could have a life together. 90% of my things, a great career, and we've spent the best part of a decade trying to get back to some kind of stable springboard once we paid off a shitload of stuff that moving here racked up. At one point things were so shitty I contemplated selling my Mum's wedding ring and moving back to the UK to do some shift work just for a few months, we were so bloody desperate. Love conquers all and all that, but we came close to the wire a few times when I had next to no income. We have not done anything to decorate anywhere we have rented or make it "ours" as we always had the feeling that we would soon be moved on. Neither of us covet anything of any value or are interested in flash fucking cars or nice TVs or granite kitchens. We just want our own house that we can dick about with in any way we see fit and a place where we will wake up in the morning and know that the landlord isn't going to move us on. We want our own spot. We're so ready for it. After nearly ten years we are just looking forward for somewhere to really call
our own.