Since our lease on our Shoreline apartment ends in October, we’ve been looking at the real estate market for a while now. Mostly it was just research, keeping an eye on what kind of things were available at what prices, but last week we started actually visiting them in person. We were thinking for a while that we’d try to do the move in October right around when our current lease finished. But things don’t always work out like you think.

First we were taken around to a few places around North Seattle. Right before we left, we saw one listing in south Shoreline that looked interesting that had just been put on the market, but we were in a hurry and didn’t make note of it. The first few places we saw were all right, but nothing caught our eye. Then we scheduled a visit to the house that we’d just seen show up, and it was the nicest thing we’d seen at that price. A lot of work had just been put into it, and the sellers needed to get out in a hurry, so the price was great. We put in an offer on the very next day.

The next day we found out that ours was one of three offers. The market is currently pretty slow in this area, so having that level of activity within one week of putting a house up is virtually unheard of. We were given an opportunity to raise our offer, but it originally included an escalation clause that brought the offer to above the asking price, which was already cutting it pretty close financially for us. So we left our offer as it was and hoped for the best. The next day we found out our offer was accepted!

We’ll have photos on Flickr before too long. It has three bedrooms and a spacious yard with a great deck and patio, so there’ll be room for entertaining and for Noah to grow.

This will be an interesting few months for us since we do still have our lease. It will end up overlapping with our mortgage payments, so it’ll be a bit tight on money for a few months. But this is really an amazing opportunity for us, and having the overlap will make the moving process less hectic. The way the offer situation went made it very clear that we had done the right thing. Our offer was obviously neither too high nor too low. We’re really thankful for the way it worked out.

As a rule I don’t plan for anything further than a few years in the future, but this is shaping to be the first time since fifth grade that I would live in one place for longer than two years.