Weather, illnesses, and just having too much fun kind of got in the way of my plan to post at least every two weeks. But that delay means this post will hopefully be a lot more interesting than hearing about… weather, illness, and fun.

Instead I get to talk about making our first (and hopefully only) offer on a house!

Since finally starting the house hunt, we’d continued on but it felt like things had slowed down. When I first got here, we had lots of houses all over the place to look through that had been posted in the weeks before my arrival. Once we’d gone through those and seen the ones we wanted to see, however, we had to wait for new listings to trickle in each day.

After the ones I wrote about previously, we continued to find more that were possibilities. One was in the neighborhood (mentioned in the last post) right between Disney and my wife’s work, but this time with a pool. And there were several right in the Hunter’s Creek area, one of which was just a three minute commute for her.

But nothing was really speaking to us. And it was starting to get a little frustrating!

Our problem probably was exacerbated by the fact that we’ve spent four years building this move up in our minds and imagining exactly what our house was going to be like. Nothing could measure up to that — at least not in our price range!

So we decided to change our mindset. No, not to “settle”. But to adjust from dream house mode to real house mode. We’d seen enough homes to know where our realistic expectations should be. With that in mind, we went back through the list of houses, both ones we’d passed on going to see previously and those we had already been to in person. And there were some that were pretty good on second look. We put two we’d already seen back on our “maybe” list, and added three more we’d seen online but had chose not to go to. After weeks of feeling stuck, now it felt like things were going in the right direction and moods brightened.

That’s when we heard it… something was finally speaking to us.

As part of our re-look, I started reconsidering areas we’d decided against. For years we’d always assumed we were going to end up on the west side of I-4, so that’s where we concentrated our dream house hunting. Then earlier this year when we were finally ready to make the move, my wife’s job ended up being east of I-4. So real house hunting was focused exclusively over there. But there are a couple of areas on the west side that do have access to her work. Sure, they’re farther than that house with the three minute commute! But it’s not terrible.

And after checking those areas this past weekend, we saw one that met a lot of our wants. We went to see it on Monday. Tuesday we talked about it. And today, 28 days after our first house hunting search with the real estate agent, we told her we’re ready to make an offer!

Unfortunately I’m going to leave you hanging on that note! Nothing is official yet, so I don’t want to mess anything up by talking about details online. But hopefully very soon we’ll have some good news. If not, the search will continue.