House of Tricks

Call me crazy, but I believe in fate, coincidences, signs, omens and luck. I’m not sure which of these came into play to purchase the house, but I’m convinced there was an outside force involved. Some quite unusual happenings helped it fall into place.

We first saw this house on a weekend tour where we saw about ten homes in total. Jim and I loved it, but decided we loved another house more, and to go for that one first. We ended up being outbid, and returned to make an offer on the first house.

We offered. They countered. We countered. They stopped returning our calls. WHAT?!

We assumed they were waiting through the weekend to see if any other offers came in, but we didn’t hear form them even on Monday. Bad feelings set in.

We later found out that a buyer offering cash had swept the house out from us, and we were left stunned and disappointed. Despite our initial attraction to a different house, we had since fallen for this one, and it was the first house that I had a really confident feeling about pursuing. I was devastated when I was told it was not meant to be. I refused to accept it.

The next week my friend Sarah called with some startling news. She had randomly discovered that the person who had stolen the house from us was her neighbor! Keep in mind that there are millions of people who live in the Phoenix area, and we are in the middle of an insanely active real estate market. The fact that we were connected to the person who got the house was fascinating and frustrating all at the same time.

A few weeks later we had found another house we liked and had an offer accepted on. As we were making arrangements to have our home inspection done, I balked. I got very uneasy about the house, and we ended up retracting our offer. No more than five minutes later, our agent received an e-mail that the offer on our favorite house had just been cancelled.

The timing was mind blowing. We were able to move quickly to re-offer and secure the house.

We closed on the house last week, and I picked up my keys yesterday. I also learned that Jerry, the man who was in charge of my mortgage proceedings, was a friend and fraternity brother of Scott, the man who sold us the house. Neither of them realized they were involved in the same process until yesterday, when they were both copied on an e-mail.

I guess when you hear that things will work out when you find the right house you just need to believe it.