It has been several weeks since I last posted. We've been coasting along doing what we committed to do and putting away our scheduled amount into savings. As I mentioned before, it has not been fun, but keeping the goal in sight is helpful.
It's hard not to keep looking at the MLS listings. I kept trying to tell myself to stop. Any house we see and like will mostly likely be off the market by the time February rolls around and we're ready to start. As well, the prices were really starting to push me close to an anxiety attack. We really want to stay in Norfolk and the price to do so, at least in terms of the houses we really liked, were looking beyond our reach. Sure, there are some great cape cod style homes, and a few bungalows that fall within our range, or even some described as needing some TLC, however most have square footage less than our apartment, and I really don't want to have to spend months making a house livable.
So just as I was making the commitment to give up my Trulia and Zillow addictions, I swiped my finger along the map displayed on my iPad and crossed the Elizabeth River into Portsmouth. Portsmouth, or P-Town as some lovingly or not so lovingly describe it, is the city where I grew up and where we lived prior to moving to Ghent. It's less than two miles from where we live now, but many people look at it as if it were hundreds of miles away. This is due mostly to the fact that Portsmouth and Norfolk are connected by tunnels due to the Navy presence and shipyards that require access along the river. The tunnels for the most part are old and antiquated and create bottleneck traffic jams on a daily basis that can turn a two mile drive into a 45 minute nightmare. Traffic however, didn't pose a problem for my finger as it scrolled over the river on my back-lit screen and landed in the neighborhood we lived in six years prior just beyond the Midtown tunnel.
Port Norfolk (www.portnorfolk.org) is a historic district and a quiet neighborhood with tree lined streets that was established from farm land in the late 1800's. Large Victorian homes are complimented by smaller cape cods, older apartment buildings with character, and craftsman style homes. In the center of the neighborhood is a small business district with a hair salon, a high end restaurant, a pizza place, and a renowned hot dog joint. It has a strong and active civic league that promotes the neighborhood well and boasts events such as a historic holiday homes tour and porch crawls, where neighbors go porch to porch for cocktails and nibblies over the course of about eight homes. We loved living there, but our apartment at the time was small and we were simply over the commute, as we both worked on the opposite side of the tunnel. That last factor alone is what made me question why I would even introduce either of my real estate apps to Portsmouth. What's the harm, I asked as I tapped on the "search here" button and began to browse what was available in our old stomping ground.
It was a nice trip through familiar surroundings as I looked at the houses for sale, many I recognized and had known the owners of. But this particular one, how did I not recognize it? Large and stately, this house screamed Atlanta or Charleston. Huge columns rose from the front porch up three stories to the attic window that jetted out from the main frame of the house. A front porch that was made for wicker, a porch swing and fabulous nights sipping wine while the breeze from the river down the street cooled the evening. As I tapped through the pictures of the inside, I was just as captivated as I had been by the exterior. Beautiful restored hardwood floors ran throughout the house. A large foyer, beautiful staircase, french doors, great kitchen, deck off the back, sleeping porch upstairs, and a listing price that made our jaws drop. Something must be wrong, in spite of the listing description stating that everything had just been renovated. As we compared listings and prices, what I had previously suspected became obviously true. Simply crossing the river made a huge impact on prices. This same house would easily list for $300-400K on the Norfolk side, and here, it was less than $200K. Oh man, what I wouldn't give to live there!!! As we both drooled over the listing, it hit us. It would take a miracle for this house to still be available and on the market in February. We put our iPads away, and swore never to talk of this house again. The sheer thought of someone snatching it up over the next eight to ten weeks was too much to dwell on. It's just best we pretend we never saw it.
Oh was I ever proud of myself for keeping my word to forget that house. I never even glanced at it again, until about 7AM the next morning. I just couldn't help it. There was some kind of draw to it. We both felt it and we both broke down time and time again and just gazed at that grand home. Within a week, we tortured ourselves even more and drove across the river to ride by. I think we were secretly hoping that we'd see it and realize that the photos online did it much more justice than seeing it in person. That would certainly extinguish this burning need to have that house. Well, so much for that idea. In a rare turn of events, the house actually looked that much more incredible from the street than it did online. I don't think we were prepared for just how big and grand it was. We literally had to open the sunroof just to look up at it from the car. So yeah, that was helpful.
No comments:
Post a Comment