Old, Red, Brick House

 
About seven years ago my next door neighbor at the time told me they were moving.  He wondered if I knew anyone who wanted to buy their house.  I told them I could think of a few people and asked them to keep us posted.  About a year later, they finally got around to actually moving.  My neighbor asked if we wanted to take a tour of the house.  We agreed, thinking we could tell our friends about it.

Upon finishing the inspection, my neighbor tore a sheet of paper from a notebook.  “This is our offer to you,” he said, handing me the sheet.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, laughing.

He continued with his speech.  “We are giving you a good deal and won’t negotiate on the price.”

“But we aren’t in the market to buy a house,” I insisted.

“If you want the house,” he said with conviction, “this is the price.  Let us know your decision in the next few days.”

I was stunned by the odd conversation.  “Okay, thanks,” I replied, shaking my head.  “We will look this over.”

We went home but didn’t think much about it.  Nancy did make a comment about how the kitchen was bigger than ours.  And I may have wondered aloud a few times as to what they were thinking.  But we were definitely not in the market to buy a new home – at least not for a few hours anyway.


The very next day, I walked past the house and it seemed to call out to me.  “Look over here,” it whispered.  I turned my head to look and suddenly got a strange idea.  I pulled out my phone and called my dad in Oregon.

“Hello.”

“Dad, do you want to live in my house?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to rent it or buy it?”

“Buy it.”

“Okay, I’ll call you back later.”  Click.

The next day I called my next door neighbor and said we’d take it.


About four weeks later it was a done deal.  After closing, Nancy and I walked through the house and talked about what we would do with each of the rooms.  I had been in the house several times over the years, but this time was different.  Most recently, I had helped carry numerous armloads of stuff out to the moving van, parked out in the driveway.  In all those trips in and out of the house, I didn’t really think about it being mine.  I guess the superstitious part of me didn’t want to jinx things by getting too wrapped up in it before it was official.

But now the house was ours, and this gave the familiar spaces a different feel than before.  We ended our tour of the house in the kitchen.  I realized there how pleasantly satisfied I was with the purchase.  Without really thinking about what we were getting ourselves into, we had actually stumbled on a great find.  “I like this house,” I said.

Nancy gave me a look that I understood roughly as, “We just bought a house, before you were sure you liked it?”

“It’s a great house,” I said.  “I think we did pretty well.”

“Yes we did,” she agreed.  “I can’t believe you are just figuring that out.”

“Everything happened too fast,” I suggested.  “I just went with the gut on this one, and it turned out to be a good thing.”

In reply, she just gave me another look.


Years later, I have come to realize this whole thing was less about the choice I made to go with the gut, and more about our good neighbors, who were really looking out for us.  They knew the house was better for our growing family, they understood prices were going up faster than most people could afford, They knew we loved the neighborhood, and they also knew we would take care of the old place like they would approve.  I suspect they decided months, if not years earlier, that we were the ones for the house.  It turns out our good neighbors were right.  They slowly made things happen, and in time, we finally fell in step with the way they had things planned.

And by the way, it has been, and still is a great house.