Return to the house

I have been infatuated with this house for the last month or so.

I wrote about the house and the owner previously, and how it was all lovely. After that, I wrote to the realtor that we wanted to “seriously consider” buying the place.

And so we started that process.

I applied for a bunch of provisional bank loans. I learned about the fees attached with buying a place. I learned about the fees attach to selling a place. I got an estimate of what we could sell our place for. I didn’t like it, contacted the realtor that sold us our current house, and got a better estimate. I learned about all the issues with the house we are looking at in detail. I mapped out time to various supermarkets by bycycle from the house. I looked at nursery schools in the area (one quite close specializes in nature and independence, which may be trendy and all, but it tickles me in the right spots).

Yesterday was the second viewing of the house to go over everything slightly wrong in the house in detail. I wasn’t really interested in that reason though. I was there to seriously imagine living there, and having our stuff in the house. This probably looked very silly, because I was starting out windows a lot, and staring at bedrooms a lot. I also stared at the dirty dirty walls a lot.

The owner’s children probably talked sense into her and they said they would sell the grand piano. The owner thought about which books they would want to keep and which they would want to sell, give or get rid of.

I noticed the imperfections in the bathroom, in the roof balcony, and in the yard. I noticed all the things I would want to renovate, and thought about all that money it would cost on top of the fees for buying and selling, that naive me didn’t include when looking at the price of the home.

I had this childish notion to myself, “I have a well paying job, don’t I? There are much more expensive places that this that are on the market, but I don’t even feel comfortable putting this much money in a place!”

Putting that aside for a second, after we viewed the house, we walked to the convenience store. It was a long 8 minutes, and it was hot. The walk there was beautiful nature filled suburban Japan, much nicer than where we live now. It was hot though, and my wife was melting away. I wanted to view the rivers after, but she needed AC.

At the very end, the realtor gave us costs for renovating everything, which came to about 8 million yen. I don’t think this included the yard, which we would have liked to do something with as well.

As of a sudden, we are well above what we originally thought about, and things began to suddenly unravel in my mind. The house was nice. I like houses of the era. I loved all the books. But… to spend XX yen for the next 35 years? We could go on so many trips, spend so much on our son’s future if we didn’t move here, and stayed in a more convenient, albeit smaller and less pretty area. What do we really want to focus on? How reckless can we be with our money? Would this place be an investment? How can I have not checked land prices in the area yet?

The infatuation became a little embarrassing, and I became sad. Here I was talking about taking these beautiful hardcover German books from the owner, when now it makes the most sense to not even buy the place.

So I am not sure what I am doing, and I am not sure what I think is best.

My wife has also cooled on the place, but she definitely wasn’t as hot as I was in the first place anyways.

So this weekend I want to “seriously consider” everything, and then I likely will say that we are not interested.

I will then work with my wife to ensure we use our money smarter, do investments properly, ensure we are using our current house in the smartest ways, and perhaps be in a better position in a few years to buy the perfect second house.

I don’t know. We’ll see.