Since my last blog about selling my house, I've gotten a lot of messages and e-mails asking how it's going. Almost every session I shoot, my client will ask me "how's that house hunt going?" Up until now I've been nervous to say much, afraid that I may jinx it. But at this point there's no way it can get more jinxed so I'll just tell you. Buying a house at the same time you're selling one sucks. It sucks. There it is.
Selling the house was the easy part. Thanks to an amazing agent, Dawn Loding, and a super cute super clean house that I must take total credit for, the house sold within the first week. They were only the second couple to see it and they snapped it up.
We thought it was a breeze at that point. We also began house hunting at that time and fell in love with an amazing house that had everything we needed. The glitch was that it was a Fannie Mae owned home that had been empty and on the market for years. We thought it was destined to be ours. Lo and behold, dealing with Fannie Mae has proved to be a nightmare. I won't go into all the details here because it will take an entire blog to get you up to speed on the ordeal we went through with them. Let's just say that I will be filing numerous complaints and writing to my president when this is all over. Long story short we were in a contract for the house and we just ended that contract today, just in time to get our earnest money back. It feels like breaking up with someone -- or actually more appropriately -- being dumped. Even though technically we did the dumping. We didn't want to. We just didn't want to bring our family into a house that has years worth of racoon feces in all the air ducts causing toxic fecal matter to be blown all over the house every time the fan starts up. No biggie, we just refused to breathe in shit on a daily basis and asked that to be cleaned up.
We may still get the house, if they can clean up the crap. But it's looking like our chances are slim. Regardless, it won't happen before our lease back period is over so we will be forced to look for temporary housing, another ordeal because we can't sign a lease since we don't know how long we'll be there, and we have pets -- indoor and outdoor pets.
We'll also begin house hunting again tomorrow. It'll be hard to jump back out there when our heart was set on the Fannie Mae house. The tricky part is finding a house without a Homeowner's Association. I want to move my studio into my home eventually and I just won't have an HOA telling me I can't do that. Most of the HOAs around here seem to have issues with home businesses.
Maybe one of these houses we look at tomorrow will sing to us. Maybe one will be big enough for me and all my loved ones, have space around it for photo sessions, have extra space for a studio inside, and be so perfectly perfect it'll make us forget about our broken dreams with the other house. Or maybe Fannie Mae will get off their rears and fix the crap in our dream house so we can move in. Fingers crossed!
Lisa On Location Photography
