After
3+ Months of searching
25+ House Showings
40+ Open Houses
2 Offers on Houses We Didn’t Get
1 Missed Opportunity
1 Successful Bid
We own a house!
Back in December of 2021 we started talking about our living situation and what to do longer term. At that point both of us each owned a house in Houston and we owned the lake house near Austin together (Spicewood, TX). We’ve been spending our time split about 50/50 between Houston and the Spicewood since the pandemic started. We agreed that neither of our houses really worked for both of us and perhaps it was time to look for something we could live in together comfortably. Also in our mind was that Travis was planning to retire in the spring of 2023 and we figured we should work towards having something sorted by then (Doug retired in 2016).
We talked a lot about where we wanted to live and what we needed in a house. Ultimately we decided on the following requirements:
Central Houston - perhaps extending out as far as Bunkerhill towards the west.
1 Story
4 bedrooms (2 for bedrooms, an office, and workout space)
Open living/dining/kitchen preferred
2 car garage minimum
Pool
We knew getting all of this in our preferred location wasn’t going to be easy, but we were open to remodeling, adding on, and putting in our own pool.
We started going to open houses in January of 2022 and pretty quickly met a realtor at one of those that we really liked. Josh was willing to spend time talking about renovation options on that house and recommended another house that hadn’t hit our radar nearby. We started working with Josh and looking at houses pretty regularly. We realized pretty quickly that things weren’t staying on the market long at all and we were likely going to have to be pretty aggressive. Through January and February we looked at houses across our original location scope and pretty soon realized that we were primarily interested in the Timbergrove & Lazybrook Subdivisions (both close to Travis’ house). The neighborhoods are inside the loop north of Interstate 10 and between 610 Loop West and T C Jester Blvd.
Offers
During that first quarter of 2022, we made an offer on two houses. In both cases there were multiple offers and both times we bowed out at some point above asking. We liked both of them and both of them were in great shape, but don’t think either of us were heartbroken that we didn’t get them.
Missed Opportunity
Then we found a new listing and went to look at it on a Friday with Josh. We liked it a lot and spent quite some time at the house talking about what we’d need to do renovation wise. Doug had bought an inexpensive house plan application and had spent some time coming up with potential plans. There was an open house on Sunday afternoon and we decided Saturday that we would go take one more look at it during the open house and in all likelihood make an offer afterwards. We warned Josh that we’d likely be calling him Sunday afternoon. During lunch Sunday, we looked and the open house had been cancelled and there was a pending offer! This was the first time we really felt we’d missed out on something.
Success!
Finally, we found a 3BR/1BA house near 18th St & Ella Blvd. It was in good shape, showed well, and was in a location we liked. Doug quickly threw together some options for remodeling that weren’t too overwhelming to consider. Travis threw a wrench into things when he indicated that after looking at various houses over the months, he really liked the idea of the living room overlooking the backyard and pool (which didn’t exist at this point). We talked through options and came up with another plan that required essentially gutting the house and adding on about 1500 sq. ft. Multiple quick visits to the house with a lot of measurements taken, we decided we had a viable option and put in an offer. Of course, once again, there was at least one other offer, but in this case we prevailed.
Because we were planning to gut the house, we elected to do no inspections, We also decided not to have a new survey done (cue ominous foreboding music). We closed pretty quickly and by April 14 had a new house!
Now we basically just need to find a builder, rip it apart and make our notional floor plan come to life.
Photos from the listing
