Okay, so life got in the way the last 8 weeks or so. I CAN'T BELIVE HOW SMALL I WAS AT 21 WEEKS! Now I have gained almost 25 pounds and am full of belly.
The biggest interruption to posting was that we almost bought a house in Brookland. I found out that Jacobs is not planning for us to come back full time for the foreseeable future, if ever. We all had to clean out our desks and we got rid of a floor or 2 of real estate. At some point (next spring?) when we return post-covid, we will only be coming to the office a few days a week and will not have a permanent desk, which means that I need to have a fully functioning work station at home. My boss also told me that if due to child care and whatnot it would be better to be in the same location all week, I could remain a full time remote employee. I would love to go mostly remote at this point to make childcare easier, but I'm also working out of our bedroom right now since we're going to be using the second bedroom as a nursery (although I might move back in there if it seems like chonks and I can share). It could be worse but I'm not sure how long this is going to work for, so the situation has gotten us to thinking about buy a new house.
I got really frustrated one Thursday and went on Redfin for the first time in years to see what was out there, and pretty quickly ended up finding a house that I loved that had just gone on the market the day before, which I was not expecting. My thought was always that whatever house we move into next, we're going to do a pretty big upgrade from our current house, and that I was going to be pretty picky about it. I LOVE our little house, we started building our life together in it, but it is small, and we always expected to outgrow it one day. I've probably had around 15 dream variations over the years where I find a large hidden room in the house I forgot about, and the owner didn't even clean it out- all there stuff is still in there and the bed is unmade (so I guess they forgot about the room too). One of our biggest issues is just storage space. On the plus side it has made us very mindful about what we keep and what we don't, but it's also a pain in the butt sometimes not being able to just throw things in a box somewhere.
I've always liked Brookland. I haven't spent a ton of time up there, but the housing stock is fantastic- big houses, often detached, varied architecture, big yards. It is kind of like you're living in the suburbs but you're still pretty central in DC. We've been up there several times to Zach's co-worker's house and I always loved driving through the neighborhood, and I loved their house. Well, it turns out that I loved it even more than I thought, because when I showed the house to Zach, we both realized that it was actually his co-workers house 🤯 They were renting it and moved to China during the pandemic, so I guess the owner decided to sell. Zach liked the house too. We stayed up until 3am that night, talking to said co-worker in China and thinking about how we could make that happen.
We didn't have a real estate agent, but the home was being sold through Redfin so we were able to book a slot to see the house on Saturday, which was Halloween. Here's me standing in front of the house that I wish was ours. I picked up this shirt from a neighbor the day before, which made me really happy. Somehow it has become my main go to- I wear it bed every night. And often to work too...
The house was both perfect and had some flaws, which put it in a price range that was generally accessible to us. The basement was weird AF- it had a room down there that literally looked like a jail cell. Some of the windows needed replaced. There was a retaining wall in the back yard that looked like it was about to fall over. The kitchen needed upgrades and I would have wanted to take down a wall to make it bigger. Ultimately, the kitchen is one of the reasons why I accepted letting it go- because Zach enjoys cooking so much and for our next house I want a really nice big space for him to have at it. We probably would have had to wait a little while financially before taking on that project.
But the pluses of the house were so crazy plus that I was a bit willing to accept another house that required some projects. You can kind of tell in the picture, but the house is a corner lot and the yard is HUGE, even for a corner lot. As a soon to be mama, all you can imagine is your children running around that yard and playing. The house also essentially had a cul de sac next to it, so in addition to the huge yard, it would also be possible to play in a bit of street. There was a cul de sac there because the house backs up to the Franciscan Monastery Gardens, so the small street next to the house is to access the alleyway behind the house.
Otherwise, you have no neighbors behind you, your view out the back window is of green space. We realized that we're a little spoiled with our current house- this side of Gales St has huge yards that also don't back up to other neighbors, so we have a lot of privacy, which is unusual in DC.
There was a big porch with a swing
This would have been our living room with the big window:
The dining room was huge. The wall on the right is what I would have wanted to knock out to make the kitchen bigger.
The addition/sun room behind the dining room:
OUR GINORMOUS BEDROOM WITH OUR OWN BATHROOM:
What I would have used as my home office:
Probably more attractive for me than for Zach for piddling around was the garage. Parking is easy up there so I would have made it made it into a workshop and maybe invested in a table saw!:
The house, even with a few flaws, was a dream. We went home and continued to devise plans. It was our 17 year anniversary, so we went out for a cold outdoor dinner, the first time we had been out together for dinner since the pandemic started. I had booked a reservation by a space heater at Makan, a new Malaysian restaurant that had opened during the pandemic and seemed like somewhere Zach (and myself) would really like:
It was nice to be out. Our scheming continued at dinner, but I remember starting to think that the house might not work out. It went on the market at such a great time, in that I happened to see it the week it went up, but we also had not put aside money for a down payment, etc.
We talked to the lender we used for our current house that evening (he was great in a crazy 1 week close on this house) and walked us through all our options, which involved a lot of crazy loans to make up for the cash we didn't have on hand. The light grew dimmer.
We still went to the open house the next day, and spoke extensively with a really friendly neighbor in the backyard who had showed up. He had done a lot of work on his house and we talked about some of the things that we would probably want to do with this house. $$$. Light continued to fade.
We spoke with our real estate agent (never actually met her, but she was nice through it all) and told her that we would basically have to give a low ball offer to make this work for us. She didn't discourage us from trying it, but kept things realistic that it probably wasn't going to work with the market the way it was, even if we got Zach's co-worker to put in a good word for us (which I didn't really want to do, since we were low balling and that would be kind of a shitty ask). She visited the house the next day for us and told us that there was an inspector there, likely meaning that someone was planning to put an offer in with no inspection contingencies to make it more competitive.
Ultimately, we didn't put an offer in, and just hoped that maybe with a miracle the house would stay on the market and we could work some magic after that. It wasn't so, it basically sold the next day.
All in all, I only cried one time about the house, but I think it made Zach feel really bad. It just wasn't the right time. The whole thing was crazy but we had also been in the house multiple times and kind of knew it already. It's going to be hard for me to find another house that quite matches this one in my esteem, but now we're back on the market, saving up money for a down payment and casually looking.
We enjoyed another gingko season on Gales St. and will be happy to welcome our little pudge ball to the place we've called home the last 7.5 years. We'll all be cramped in here together :)
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