Once More into the Breach, My Friends

Sometimes life happens too fast and too intensely to be able to capture it as it's unfolding. This has certainly been the case over the past month, during which it's felt like our home-buying lives have been turned completely upside-down.

But let's start from the beginning. As planned, my hubby and I rented a car on the third weekend in March to explore the Morristown area, taking along with us all the listings our realtor had sent us to preliminarily explore the neighborhoods and the outsides of the properties.

As expected, we really liked what Morristown's downtown area had to offer, and made a second visit to Kings; we discovered that we appreciated it even more than we did in the course of our first visit. As far as we were concerned, it was definitely the "king" of supermarkets, especially in terms of its variety of gourmet and vegetarian items, and its selection of pre-prepared food. We had a delightful lunch at a place my mom had recommended, Callaloo Cafe, which provided a great view of the emerging greenery in its back lot, fun music at a reasonable volume, plenty of space to move around in (a welcome contrast to restaurants in NYC), good service, and *delicious* food (I had a fabulous angel hair primavera pasta flavored with lemon and olive oil). The portions were so huge that I had to get about half of it to go. But then the dessert menus came. I'd started cutting back on desserts when going out to eat because it seemed as though I'd been indulging in them overmuch lately, but the darned place managed to hack into my system with a Diet Override Code in the form of a cappuccino mousse -- none of the NYC restaurants I'd been to had ever offered *that*, so I simply couldn't pass up this non-replicable experience. (And it was worth it!) After lunch, we continued our stroll around the downtown streets on foot in what was luckily relatively warm weather (for March!), and even popped into Century 21 briefly, which was mighty department-store medicine indeed.

We were in for a surprise when we explored the residential areas, however. Our first stop was a large-ish ranch house whose owners happened to be home and let us in to explore its lovely interior, complete with large living room picture window, jacuzzi tub in the newly renovated bathroom, substantially-sized bedrooms, and colossal basement, all in excellent condition. But there was just one problem -- the front and back yards were *vertical*. Yes, that's right -- the house was situated on a lot tilted at what felt like a 45-degree angle, such that I was unsure of my footing outside and was envisioning nightmare scenarios of our car uncontrollably careening down what would be an ice-covered driveway during the depths of winter. We hadn't bargained for a property that required rappelling gear to navigate!

And the worst part is that it wasn't just a fluke. Nearly every single other property listing we checked posed similar problems -- they were all either embedded into or at the edge or base of a cliff. So were about 80% of the other houses in town; since we had a town map with us and an entire day to explore, we drove along virtually every street listed. We'd had no idea that Morristown's residential areas were situated on such dramatic terrain! Driving along the road was very reminiscent of the deep-dipping hills of San Francisco, where I'd just been on business the week before. We felt like we were in some kind of post-modern adaptation of "The Sound of Music." How did people manage to live like this? Were they all die-hard hikers??? I mean don't get me wrong, the idea of living in the mountains is certainly appealing, but come on!

The remaining 20% of the areas in Morristown that did not have this issue consisted of homes at the two opposite extremes of the economic scale, oddly enough. The neighborhoods were either clearly run-down and industrial-looking, or they were so visibly wealthy that we could tell the houses would be way, way out of our price range without looking up a single listing.

So where did that leave us middle-classers? We drove home feeling massively disappointed. Apparently Morristown was not quite as strong a prospect as it had originally seemed. We were back to Square One. Again.

After we woke up the next morning, we recalled that there were two other areas just outside of Morristown itself: Morris Plains and Morris Township. Since Morris Plains was geographically the more straightforward of the two in terms of a defined locale, and since we still had the rental car for another day, we figured we had nothing to lose by exploring Morris Plains as well (despite the fact that only a couple of listings there showed up online in our price range -- all the others were significantly higher -- which was daunting).

The weather was warm and sunny, and made for a delightful drive over. And what a difference we saw! The land was quite level (as the town's name suggested), and the area was uniformly pleasant -- no sketchy bits to avoid at all as far as we could tell. The houses were consistently well cared for, and green space was abundant (largely in the form of vast parks and stretches of woods). The train station was in good condition (though on a smaller scale than Morristown's) and the town itself was compact enough that a 15-minute walk in any direction from that point covered most of it. The downtown area of Morris Plains contained all the essential goods and services we would need, and the storefronts suggested a solid middle-class business district. (Only when we crossed the town border into part of Morris Township did it start to feel a bit more exurban.) Better yet, just about everyone we passed in the street was friendly and visibly relaxed and happy. What really sold us on Morris Plains was that it was a great place to take a day trip even if we hadn't been house-hunting there. The question was: could we afford it? We wrapped up the day by grabbing some ice cream at Friendly's before driving back home.

Over the next few days, our realtor sent us several listings, most of which were in Morris Township but one of which was in Morris Plains. On Sunday of the following weekend, we took the train into NJ to go exploring with her for the first time. Or so we thought. About halfway there, my hubby's cell phone rang -- it was our realtor. Her mother, who we learned was suffering from cancer, had apparently taken a sudden turn for the worse that looked like it might be fatal, so she was unavailable to meet with us. The situation was more than understandable, but left us in an awkward position. However, she was considerate enough to have arranged for a replacement to meet us and take us into the properties we were interested in investigating.

She was certainly nothing to write home about, despite our realtor's high praise for her competence and temperament. After showing up nearly half an hour late at the station, she proceeded to get lost on the roads she was traveling on, lose track of which listings we were seeing (none of which she'd seen herself), brag about the million-dollar homes she'd sold, and even inadvertently insult us by commenting that the places where we worked implied that we didn't make much money (which we don't, but was it necessary for her to be so crass about it?). And on top of that, she wasn't particularly articulate and didn't tell us much of anything useful about the areas we were driving through. It was deja-vu: our old realtor from Maplewood all over again.

Our initial stops were a few ugly townhouses in crummy parts of Morristown that felt oppressive as soon as we walked into them -- cavernous and light-starved despite the sunny day, carpeted to death, and surrounded by parking lots and concrete. We would sooner have stayed in our existing apartment -- which has much better views from the windows and a much nicer interior -- and rented for another year. After our discouraging trip to Morristown, we had initially decided to consider townhouses as well as single-family houses in an attempt to maximize our options, but we saw that it was just NOT WORTH IT! (Our realtor later explained that townhouses in Morristown were for the most part limited to the less desirable parts of town because people in single-family homes wouldn't allow them to be developed in their neighborhoods, for fear of negatively impacting property values.)

We saw a few other houses afterwards in the Morris Township section we had briefly entered during our rental car excursion. While it certainly didn't feel unsafe, it was clearly less appealing than neighboring Morris Plains. The houses themselves were...interesting. Each had its own unique charm -- and problems. One house, which had a very cool, spacious open floor plan and abundant wood floors, also gave me the sense that it had been cheaply constructed, and it had a backyard whose boundaries terminated in a steep drop on all sides. Another couple of houses, whose interiors were tastefully decorated and came with great new appliances (including, in one of them, a large-screen TV!), had a very awkward, chopped-up layout and a series of small (almost to the point of being unusable) rooms and similarly small common areas.

We then headed over to Morris Plains to see the single listing our realtor had sent us for that area. And it looked wonderful. The house was on a corner lot, and the front yard was beautifully landscaped with a Japanese maple and blue spruce tree, along with other attractive shrubs. The backyard was completely level, well cared for, and spacious enough even for a large-ish dog -- and already fenced in to boot! There was solid, elegant cobblestone paving around the perimeter that culminated in a patio out back, offering a view of the entire yard, and a sliding glass door behind it leading to the inside. The windows throughout were almost all new.

The interior was quite nice as well, if a little less impressive than the outside. It was in good condition throughout, though the rooms were a bit on the small side. The living room and dining room, while adequate, were at the edge of what we would consider comfortable. The galley kitchen, while offering plenty of counter and cupboard space, was not big enough to include a small table with chairs like our apartment kitchen does. And the four bedrooms, a bit more than we needed, seemed like they might be challenging in terms of accommodating our relatively large furniture (especially since two of those four bedrooms were functionally in the attic, with sloped ceilings beneath the eaves of the roof). The floor in one of the bedrooms on the ground floor was also quite rough, and would clearly need redoing. There was a half-bath in the attic and a full bath on the ground level -- we would have preferred the opposite way around, though we realized there was room to expand the upstairs one later. There was a large finished basement in great shape with all kinds of potential, but no obvious signs of heating, which could be an issue during the winter, though we realized we could probably add forced-air heating later without too much trouble, and that it might already offer some natural insulation by being underground.

Angels did not sing, but it was a great house -- by far the best we'd seen so far. We decided to have my parents come and take a look at it. Luckily they were available right away, and while we waited for them to get there, we went to see the last property on our list, a townhouse in a part of Morris Township near the Convent Station train station -- and a total bust. In addition to it just plain not impressing us at all, the kiss of death was that all its front windows looked onto a tennis court. No grass, no trees, not even a parking lot -- a tennis court! Hey, we have nothing against tennis, but we had no interest whatsoever in having it visually dominate our lives. And one had to wonder how many stray balls resulted in shattered windows on the property. NO THANKS!

Once my parents arrived at the Morris Plains house we liked, they essentially echoed all the same pros and cons about it that we had assessed. Overall, though, they (like us) thought that the balance was in the house's favor.

And then out of the blue, the agent we were going around with got a call from our realtor! Apparently her mother's condition had significantly improved and she was out of immediate danger, so was free to come and meet us. When she arrived, we were glad to see her and brought her up to speed on our findings.

After some extended discussion amongst all of us, and some further conversation at the realtor's office, my parents, my hubby, and I all went out for dinner at Callaloo Cafe aftewards, during which they gave their blessing for my hubby and me to make an offer on the house provided we gave ourselves a chance to sleep on it and take measurements to make sure that all our belongings would comfortably fit. (We vowed to bring a tape measure and our furniture dimensions with us on every house-hunting trip from that point forward so that we wouldn't have to keep making repeat visits.)

We called our realtor the next day and made an appointment for the following day to go back and measure. It was going to be a tight squeeze to arrange all our possessions sensibly within it, and we weren't sure if we could make it work. The *overall* space of the house was great, but the space within the individual rooms was a bit of an issue, especially considering how much of the wall space was unusable due to the extensive presence of radiators beneath every window and an excess of closets in random places along the walls. We would rather there had been fewer, larger rooms rather than so many small rooms, but my hubby's mom insightfully pointed out that the two downstairs bedrooms, which were directly adjacent, could have the wall between them knocked down to create a larger space.

In the meantime, we had our realtor request a seller's disclosure from the selling agent, which upon examination seemed to have been somewhat carelessly put together. The listing had advertised an updated roof, while the disclosure listed it as 10 years old. Just how updated was "updated"? Our realtor called the seller's agent for clarification, and was told that the roof was in fact only 5 years old -- but nowhere did that appear in writing, which we considered a major oversight. The seller's disclosure also indicated that a radon test had been done, but did not report the outcome of that test. And finally, it turned out that an oil tank had been found underground during a previous inspection, but at least it had been addressed and deemed safe. These points would all require some further pursuit and written vetting.

We also received some unsettling news -- a couple of other people who had seen the house around the same time we did had also requested seller's disclosures, one of whom had indicated to the seller's agent that an offer would be forthcoming. The price had just recently been dropped by about $30,000, which resulted in somewhat of a feeding frenzy. Great, a competitor -- the last thing we needed!

The following day we went back, tape measure in hand, and determined that everything would fit, if only barely (under the condition that we used the basement as an office, praying that it wouldn't be too cold until we could afford to install forced-air heating). We also timed a leisurely walk from the house to the train station: exactly 12 minutes. It looked like a go. We went back to the realtor's office, signed the offer contract, and held our breath. We were comforted that at least we would be the first ones to be getting our offer in, and that our realtor considered our initial offer price a fair one. She said she would try to present our offer in person to the seller's agent and hopefully even to the sellers themselves if possible -- a very different approach taken from that of our previous realtor in Maplewood, who did it all by phone and fax.

We received a call later that evening from our realtor saying that the competing party had called and promised to have their offer in by first thing the following morning, and that the sellers, who worked late, were not yet home, so she couldn't deliver the offer in person. Since our offers were arriving so close together, the seller's agent said it was likely that both would be considered equally. We would probably hear something by late the following morning.

The following morning and afternoon came and went, with complete silence from our realtor. Finally at around 4pm, I called her to find out what the heck was going on. No answer, so I had to leave a message. She called me back about half an hour later with an update: apparently the two offers were relatively close -- the competitor's was a little higher, but they couldn't close as soon, and the sellers were anxious to close ASAP. So their decision was to have both parties make their best and final offer, with no third chances for haggling, and that the higher of the two offers would be accepted regardless of closing date. Our realtor told us that the seller's agent had confided in her that the seller was not a particularly nice guy; he'd worked with him for a long time, and found that he was prone to fits of bad temper, from which the seller's agent wanted to protect our realtor. Great, so the seller was basically a jerk, too! YAY.

We agonized over what to offer. We were certainly prepared to go up, but by how much was not clear. On one hand, we knew that this house was a good find and we didn't want to risk losing it, but on the other, we were hesitant to go very close to the asking price because it was at the top of our range, and this was not our dream home. And besides, whatever happened to this alleged "buyer's market"? We didn't want to overpay in a purchasing climate that was supposedly in our favor because we got carried away in a bidding war. Besides, the best months for inventory, April and May, were still ahead of us. And we could even go into June if we had to. We didn't want to part with too much too soon.

So we made a second offer about $8,000 higher than our first one. And we got creamed by the competition, whose offer was $10,000 higher even than *that* -- with a 25% down payment to boot. Twenty-five percent -- how was that possible??? It was a struggle for us to offer even our measly little 5%. We guessed that either she was not a first-time home-buyer and therefore had built up equity from a previous house that allowed her to do it, or had an extremely high-paying job, or had gotten a generous alimony package, or was independently wealthy. But whatever the reason, she was clearly far beyond us in terms of material assets. We were playing in the big leagues now.

We dusted ourselves off as best as we could, and tried to be optimistic about our future possibilities. There were no appropriate listings to explore last weekend, so we stayed home and did our taxes instead. At least we're getting a refund this year, which is a welcome contrast to last year and an unexpected surprise -- more to add to the house-cash hopper!

And then this past Monday, I got more bad news, this time from our loan officer. That measly little 5% we were counting on being able put down, free of PMI? No longer an option. She informed us that the investors who buy loans and the banks that underwrite lender-paid MI are panicking as the economy continues to spiral downwards and fewer people are in a position to stay on top of their colossal debt loads. Apparently 5% is too close for comfort for most of them -- even when it comes to people with great credit -- in the event that borrowers end up defaulting on their loans in a declining housing market with the threat of negative equity looming large. The lenders would then be stuck with an investment that was worth less than what the borrower paid for it. They now required 10% down as a minimum for lender-paid MI -- *double* what we had originally planned. We still had the 5% option if we agreed to pay PMI (which specifically safeguards the lender against such a situation), but the significant added expense of PMI (.78% of the total loan amount divided by 12) would reduce by quite a bit the total purchase price we'd be able to pay to yield the same monthly figure. And to be frank, we're already close to the bottom of the heap in the towns we've been looking in as it is, so we need all the wiggle room we can get.

Our only other options were to:
a) do an FHA (Fannie Mae, government-subsidized) loan, which would still require some PMI, would necessitate a higher interest rate each month, and would involve a 3/8% price adjustment payment upfront so as not to get charged the maximum interest rate,
b) revisit the issue of the VA loan my hubby qualifies for which, while requiring no PMI, would involve a higher interest rate and would put us completely at the mercy of the VA's appraisers, whose byzantine regulations often translate into deal-killers on the homes being reviewed (we even found the regulations they use online, which supported our impressions),
or
c) hope that my family would offer to close the gap for the remaining 5%. This was certainly the easiest option logistically, but the most difficult psychologically. My family, while financially stable, isn't exactly rolling in dough, and having them chip in on our behalf would prevent them from being able to do other things with their hard-earned cash. And 5% is not a trivial amount for the price range we've been looking in -- it would be 2/3 above and beyond the total we both had available, including a good chunk of my entire life's savings.

That night, before I fell asleep, I finally broke down and cried. This was all just seeming more and more impossible by the day. The prospect of having to renew our lease for another year seemed very real, and was a scenario I utterly dreaded with every fiber of my being. I'd *already* been stuck in NYC for far longer than I'd ever wanted to be. My hubby tried to comfort me as best as he could, but my sense of hope was in tatters. One of my co-workers who had been looking for a house in NJ with her husband a couple of years ago said that it was one of the most stressful and depressing times of her life, and now I understood why. In the end, the right place at the right price never materialized for them, and they continued to rent. What if that happened to us too? What if all our Herculean efforts amounted only to failure?

The rest of the week was a slog as we weighed our options. My parents and grandmother recognized the gravity of our situation and were very supportive, saying they would help how they could. Even our loan officer was concerned about how I was doing in the wake of the bomb she'd dropped in our laps (which, we fully knew, was completely beyond her control); she e-mailed me to check up on me and assure me that she would do everything she could to facilitate whatever loan we decided on, and that she wouldn't let us lose a property if she could possibly find a way around it. I was touched that she cared!

In the end, my dad asked that we send him and my mom some documentation indicating how we had arrived at our calculations of what we could afford to spend month-to-month versus our anticiapted costs, and what we could afford to spend upfront versus our anticipated costs, taking into account the tax benefit that we would get as homeowners and what our net pay would be taking 10 exemptions each. These calculations had taken nearly a month to work out, and were not in a form that was comprehensible to much of anyone besides myself and maybe my hubby. And the exemption component was new -- we had to ask our respective payroll departments about it.

So I spent several hours re-compiling the figures across multiple Excel spreadsheets in an easily digestible format, completely disclosing all the details of our finances. It was hard to know how all this information would be interpreted and what the implications would be, but in the spirit of transparency and the fact that we needed their help, it seemed like the right thing to do.

At the very end of the week, I had a long-overdue appointment with my hairdresser. As she combed through my wet hair, she alerted me to several clearly visible clumps that kept coming out in her comb. As she kept combing, the clumps kept coming. She said that ordinarily wasn't supposed to happen more than twice, but it seemed to happen no matter how many times she combed, so she stopped for fear of removing too much hair. She said she could see a thinning spot on my scalp that she was concerned about, and asked if I'd changed anything in my diet or in my routine, etc. I hadn't particularly, other than that my stress level had been through the roof, which I mentioned to her. Not only was there all the house stuff to contend with, but work had been insanely busy all along as well. She tried to encourage me as much as possible and urged me to try to combat the stress as much as I could because the long-term physical effects of it could be serious, which I already knew. Easier said than done, but I appreciated her concern and she was definitely coming from the right place. "Things have a way of working out," she told me repeatedly. "Don't make yourself sick."

In the meantime, our realtor had come up with a few more listings for us to consider exploring this weekend. Most of them were, unfortunately, much too far from the train stations to be walked to and from within a reasonable amount of time on a regular basis, and others had rooms that were even more chopped up than the ones in the house on which we had made an offer, but three candidates remained. We made arrangements with our realtor to go and see them yesterday, and so we did.

One of them was a house in Morristown that was severely marked down in asking price despite what seemed on paper like stunning interiors because it was located right next to a hospital, with all the accompanying noise pollution that that entailed -- sirens, helicopters landing, and frequent traffic -- not a very residential experience. The backyard also faced directly onto a parking lot, which didn't help either. And the walk to and from the train station was quite a bit farther than it had looked on our map. As it turned out, the house had gone under contract before we'd even gotten there, so for someone, the price was right. Even at the reduction, we knew it wasn't what we were looking for.

The second house we saw was one that, in all our time browsing listings thus far, had come the closest to seeming like it could be our dream home -- it was in Morris Township just 2 blocks from the border of Morris Plains, and we had seen alluring online photos showing a spacious living room and formal dining room with gleaming hardwood floors, a kitchen large enough to accommodate a small table and chairs as well as having plenty of counter and cupboard space, generously sized bedrooms, a huge finished basement, and a wooden deck with a tree view, all in seemingly great condition. It also had 3 full bathrooms and central air, which were unusual in the price range we'd been looking in, and was made of brick as opposed to the vinyl and aluminum siding of nearly every other property we'd seen. We braced ourselves for the catch. As our realtor drove us towards its location, we passed a street corner with a liquor store, gas station, hole-in-the-wall deli, auto body shop, and Pizza Hut all clustered together. Please don't turn there, I thought.

She turned there.

Damnit. So *that* was the explanation for the relatively reasonable price.

The photos of the house's interior did not lie -- the downstairs looked even more stunning in person. It felt almost like a gallery. The basement was even nicer than that of the house we'd just put a bid on (with the exception of the plethora of stuffed dear heads, skulls, and antlers mounted on the wall, and the stuffed coyote and fox that had been positioned on the floor). The bedrooms were plenty spacious, although I found the closets in them awkward and hard to deal with -- some on a sliding track (which I can't stand, because they *always* get stuck and it's a pain to constantly wrestle with them) and some which had very short stretches of racks for hangers interrupted by big blocky shelves, for which we had no use. These issues could be worked around and certainly weren't dealbreakers, but they further dampened my enthusiasm. The railings along the stairs and the lamppost in the front yard were also quite wobbly, and the upstairs bedroom, while enormously spacious, felt odd -- nothing we could really put a finger on, but something we both sensed in equal measure. The biggest disappointment, however, was the backyard. Although it was separated from the inside of the house by beautiful French doors, it was not only somewhat small, but it offered no privacy whatsoever -- all the neighboring houses were practically piled on top of it, to the extent that all the yards in the area almost gave the impression of being shared space. It felt more like an apartment complex than a house on the outside, and it didn't help that the current owners had firmly installed a very prominent and tacky castle-shaped play structure in which to store their patio furniture and children's outdoor toys. As far as the front yard went, the path to the end of the block had no sidewalk, so I would have had to walk in the street itself twice a day, every day, to get back and forth from the train station.

So, perhaps it could have been our dream house as long as we never set foot outside. And if we weren't going to enjoy the outside, why buy a house? We might as well stay in the concrete box we were already renting but at least not committed to.

We timed the walk to the Morris Plains train station -- exactly 15 minutes, which was just within our limit.

Was it worth bringing my parents out to see it? We thought and thought and thought about it, and then we decided it wasn't what we wanted. It had more space than we would realistically need, and left something to be desired location-wise. With the "location, location, location" mantra thoroughly drummed into our heads, we figured this might not be the wisest investment of our resources -- and we still had almost three more months to find something better. Besides, we weren't yet sure how the financial conundrum we'd recently found ourselves in would be resolved.

We looked at one more house, this one in Morris Plains and exquisitely located, right across the street from the library and a large park and surrounded by many lovely homes. However, the owner had decided to build an addition onto the back of the house whose workmanship was of far poorer quality than that of the rest of the house. There was no longer a formal dining room, and instead one of the new bedrooms was being used for that purpose. That might not have been a problem if the floor of said bedroom didn't look more appropriate for a laundry room than a dining room. The other bedrooms had a drab, dull vibe to them and I felt like I was sick of the place before we even left. While it wasn't openly run-down or shabby, it had an unkempt, bogged-down feel to it. My hubby and I both agreed that we would actually be embarrassed to have guests there, so it wouldn't do at all despite the ideal location.

Our realtor once again offered the encouragement that April and May were very good months for inventory, and said that she would be continuing to look out for good places for us, probably sticking primarily to Morris Plains. That seemed reasonable to us, though it was disappointing to leave empty-handed.

Afterwards we met up with my parents, and discussed all the documents I sent them, and our financial situation, at great length. The upshot of the discussion was that they thought the calculations and our estimates were basically sound, though they helped us tweak a few items in the context of their tax implications, and suggested a bigger budget for a used car. To our delight, they agreed to cover the remaining 5% we would need for the down payment. While we would rather there not have been a need for it, we were thrilled and touched by their generosity, and liberated by the knowledge that we could continue to proceed in our search as we had been, unhindered.

So now it's just a matter of waiting for the right place to show up!!!