Offered

If we could ram together details from all four of the Village houses that we've looked at so far we'd come up with something perfect. The first one we looked at was owned by someone who had the charming profession of hand-making harpsichords, and was nice except that the previously open kitchen had been walled in. The second one has a second bathroom and finished basement, but may need the air conditioning and windows replaced. The third needs just about all its kitchen appliances replaced (and is chock-full of patriotic garbage and a fridge with a permanent-marker chart on it where time is being measured in beer, but those wouldn't be our problem) and the fourth had an expanded kitchen that was fantastic, but had a monumentally dingy basement and looked like its owner hadn't ever really left the 1950s.

We put in our offer for the second of these today - undercutting the actual asking price by $30,000, so our chances of acceptance are not high just now, but we're doing this to try and beat the high price down. I thought that it would be a fairly simple process of signing some documents and sending them, but with us and our agent gathered around the glass table at the front of Coldwell Banker with a plasma screen up on the wall, it was more like a strategy meeting in a NATO war room, talking about what was best to put on each line to try to wrestle the sellers and their agent into thinking that we sound convincing.

Our agent says that this seller is (quote) a "tough bird" but that she's dealt with her before - she seems ready to storm her with a full-blown Wright/Edgeworth style confrontation, and when I imagine that, I'm rather sorry to miss it. But it's nice to have a sense of calm now that we have made some sort of decision, and that we have a small period of time where things are out of our own hands.

I'm just about ready for a weekend, after all this.