My Possible New Home

I'm posting some pictures of the new house that we should hear back from the buyer today (after finally figure out how to use the slideshow feature on Picasa). Chances are we'll have to raise our offer a little bit but hopefully there's a zone to negotiate in. This place will cut my commute to work by maybe more than half.

The view is pretty good. I don't want to sound like a brat but I know there are other houses that we looked at with better view but with the combination of price and distance to the office this one is great. I really dig the Tuscan style, although I think my mom hated it at first. My favorite room is the study. One of the houses that we grew up in my parents had someone come in and custom build a bookshelf for my sister and me in our rooms so we can put all our books. I can't quite explain it but I always loved that bookshelf. It's easy to put all the books and what not there. Maybe it makes me feel smart? Not quite sure. There is a tree kind of blocking the view of the hill but I think I can easily chop it down or even we put in a pool that's probably gotta go anyway.

Fingers crossed that we got a desperate selling on our hands. The seller has already moved out for a while, I think he's in Florida now? I just think that the house has a lot of character and I loved Chianti when I visited.

I do have to make a brief comment related to trading on this. Personally, my view of the housing market that is it'll probably reach true bottom next year, but we all know how hard it is to pick the exact bottom. There's a lot of news on how much the housing crisis has created and although I didn't see as many signs w/ the house that we made an offer on, the house the next door was also for sale and I could piece together some signs of just much pain the seller is trying to sell the house. The house next door is smaller and the view is better, but it's been sitting on the market almost too long and the price has gone down I think by about 300 to 500k. The realtor said the seller was an interior designer and designed the house himself. Although I can't say I liked the layout of the house... there were just... too much wall. My personal opinion is that he didn't utilize the space well enough and ended up w/ bunch of rooms that were just too small and cramped, at least for my style. Even the kitchen was kind of small.

Anyway, what I saw from around the house I was willing to bet that this guy was divorced b/c all you see are pictures of his kids or him w/ his kids but there's no picture of the mom what so ever, which I thought at least was kind of interesting/weird. The master bedroom was just a full size, maybe a really small queen? It just seems out of place for a "family" bed. There were two rooms for the kids but as I peeked to seek the closet space there were no clothes in there, which led me to guess that the kids just visit on weekends. So we've got a below average interior designer in a struggling economy and housing market (I'm not trying to make fun of the guy but I really think the layout of the house is terrible), divorced, and the bank is about to foreclose on his house unless he sells it before a certain date. I feel for the guy, you know? Can you imagine families out there with more kids and worse jobs than this guy and how much they're going through trying to make payments on their mortgage.