Phase 3 Begins

If phase 1 was moving here, and phase 2 has been settling in with Commuter Son, then we've reached part 3.

It's time to commit.

Yup, it is time for us to buy a house here in New York. Like most home-owning folk, we have to sell one before we can buy another. What compounds this little problem is that before we can sell the one in Michigan, we need to move things out of it, and we can't move things out of it until we have somewhere to put them (don't say "storage unit" to me--I don't have good luck with them), and we won't have somewhere to put them until we sell the house in Michigan. It's a bit like the wheels on the bus, really.

I am, as is well documented, a firm believer in inviting the divine into our quandries (in whatever way is most comfortable--prayer, chant, drum, spell, meditation, bike ride), and then getting busy. I have limited patience for those who believe that prayer alone solves problems. I have equally limited patience for those who don't believe that prayer in whatever form works.

So there we are, stuck with our housing dilemma and frozen in place because the prospect of magically manifesting a house is, well, daunting.

There's a house here in town that I've long admired and that has long been empty so, knowing that I needed to do something (anything), I contacted the listing agent to ask about it. A couple of weeks later, she had introduced me to one of her agents who does, in fact, specialize in...(drum roll please)...difficult circumstances such as ours. We met, she said "we've got this" and I left feeling like maybe, just maybe, that light at the end of the tunnel was not, in fact, Thomas the Tank Engine.

Commuter Kid and I looked at our first 3 houses today. One was a definite "no." One was "this is lovely and I could live here without too much complaint" and the third is, well, it. (Note: the house I first contacted the realtor about has sold, and not to us.) The third one is imperfect. It's old, needs paint and carpet, wants a good scraping and a fair bit of sweat equity, but it feels like our house. After we were finished looking and I had sent pictures back to Michigan, I was talking to Commuter Dad, who said this: "We bought our first two houses for logical reasons and that didn't work out so well. Maybe this time we should follow our hearts." Maybe so.

There are a pair of intertwined stories about this house that I want to tell, but prudence holds me back. You know--that feeling of not want to "jinx" something. But it feels good, and I'm optimistic. And well, even if it's not this house, it will be a house. And what I know is that whichever house it is, will be exactly the house for us.