As many of you know, we had previously made an offer on a house in Pittsburgh in 2017 so my wife and I thought we understood the process. We would make an offer, we would hear back in the next 24 hours, and then go from there. The offer on house #3 was submitted on the evening of Sunday September 9th, 2018. Our realtor responded back within minutes that it had been sent to the seller.
Monday came. I was back at work in Hartford trying to focus on anything but the house. All day my mind was racing. I kept checking my email and checking my phone. Nothing. It was less than 24 hours since we had submitted the offer so I knew I had to be patient. I barely slept that night. Tuesday came. I was even more on edge because surely the seller had time to review our offer now. Without a doubt we thought we would hear back that day. I sat in my grey cubicle flipping back and forth between the Zillow listing and my email, looking for something. Would the Zillow listing say pending first? Would I get a call from our realtor? I scrolled through the Zillow pictures a hundred times, each time feeling a knot in my stomach grow larger as I waited to hear back about the offer. I called my wife at lunch and we theorized about why we hadn’t heard anything yet. It seemed too early to contact our realtor again but, then again, we didn’t really know how long we should wait. Maybe buying homes in New York was different than buying homes in Pittsburgh. There must be extra steps in the process that we were unaware of. Probably paperwork or other legal steps that were slowing down the process. I left work, ate a small dinner, all while keeping my phone close by. There was no response on Tuesday.
Wednesday came, then Thursday, then Friday. If I was a wreck by Wednesday, by Friday it was worse because I KNEW something was wrong. No amount of paperwork should have slowed down the process this much. Why hadn’t we at least heard from our realtor yet? The silence was debilitating. At that point we broke down and contacted our realtor, fishing for some sort of update. Friday evening we got a response back. “Haven’t heard anything yet. I’ll follow up.” What. The. F. That’s it? What does that mean? The next two days were not a fun weekend.
On Monday the waiting game resumed. No response. No reply. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Nothing. This rolled into the next week. Monday. Tuesday. Wednesday. My wife and I were now certain our offer had not been accepted, but it made no sense why we haven’t received any sort of formal response. We had no closure and the situation continued to haunt us. Did we still have a chance at the house? Were we wasting our time? As the silence continued, our remaining hope dwindled away. We were embarrassed at ourselves for getting our hopes up. It wasn’t Pittsburgh in 2017 bad, but this whole experience still left us feeling hollow. At some point, about 4 weeks after we submitted the offer our realtor finally got back to us with news. “The sellers had a previous offer on the house and were taking it.” Well, shit.
….
Life moved on. We moved on (sort of). I maintained my Hudson valley Zillow filter and even expanded it a little bit to include west of the Hudson and east towards Connecticut. To maintain my sanity, I stopped checking it nightly, instead catching up on posts on the weekend. Thankfully, the holidays were coming up so we had a series of good distractions. We held our annual Halloween party in the city and started to plan for Thanksgiving and Christmas, which we would spend with my parents in Albany, and my wife’s parents in Pittsburgh, respectively. I also started to travel more frequently to North Carolina for work. I would fly there on Monday morning and fly back to New York City on Thursday evening.
The week of Thanksgiving 2019 our lives received a bit of a jolt. My wife, who had been looking for a new job since our home searches in Pittsburgh, finally found an amazing new opportunity in the city. The job offered a more flexible commute and included a decent pay raise. The same week she started there, I also learned that my long awaited promotion was finally happening. I also was getting a raise and a bonus that actually gave us some real savings. We celebrated at Thanksgiving with my family and I flew back to North Carolina on Monday. After Monday December 3rd came Tuesday December 4th.
I was sitting at my desk in Charlotte, NC when I got a push notification on my phone from Zillow. “New home in your area!” it said. I didn’t have push notifications set up on my phone so, to this day, I’m not sure why I received that message. It was the morning and things were slow, so I clicked on the link.
The home was on the west side of the Hudson, an area we had not strongly considered due to the commute and home prices, and was more in the country rather than a town or city. Nonetheless, it was downright beautiful. The price was higher than anything we had previously considered, but with a new job and new promotion, it was actually within our price range.
I texted my wife and waited for a response. By lunch she had texted me back. “We need to contact the realtor NOW.” The house had just been listed that day, right when I received the Zillow notification. There was no way we were going to let someone else put an offer in before us. I contacted our realtor at lunch. I was scheduled to fly back to the city on Thursday evening. “Can we see the house first thing Friday morning?” I asked. “7am?”.I need to digress momentarily. Why did I suggest 7am on Friday morning? The first part of the answer is that Friday was the soonest I would be back in New York. The second part of the answer is that my wife had JUST started a new job and needed to be there at 9:30 am Friday morning in the City. She had no vacation or sick days to use at that point. According to my quick research, it we got to the house at 7am, we could tour the house for 30 minutes and then I could rush my wife to the NJ transit train station near by and get her on the 7:45am train which should get her into the City and back at her office by about 9:30am. I was going to have to rent a car for the trip, but there was no way I could drive back to the City in time through rush hour traffic. The train was the only way we could get my wife into the City on time for work.
Anyways, Thursday night I flew back into New York from North Carolina. I took a detour to the upper west side to rent a car and parked it on the street in front of our Washington Heights apartment. We had a tight schedule on Friday. We needed to get up at 4am and leave the city by 4:30am to ensure that we could get up to the house before 7am. Technically, Google said the house was only 50 minutes away from our apartment in the Heights but I was familiar with New York City traffic. A 30 minute trip could easily turn into a two hour trip, particularly when traveling across a bridge was a requirement. My wife needed to be on that 7:45am train so we HAD to be on time. Being late was not an option.
Friday morning we were up and out of the City before dawn. The George Washington Bridge was eerily quiet as we left Manhattan and headed up the palisades. Thankfully there was no traffic, so we ended up getting to the house before the sun was even up. Since there were no street lights on that road, we headed to the nearest Dunkin Donuts for coffee. It made no sense to stay at the house if we couldn’t see it. We drove into a small village nearby in Orange County. It lacked the lights and chaos of the City and reminded me of where I grew up just south of Albany. The Dunkin had just opened when we arrived. It was December 7th and the temperature was in the 20s. Slight rain in the City had turned into a light snow as we got closer to the house and into the village. We sat in the dark parking lot until the sun came up. I think we were too nervous or too tired to talk.
Once the sun was up, we put the car in drive and headed back to the house. It was, at best, 6am and we had a while to wait until the realtor showed up at 7. The house was empty so we pulled our car into the driveway and decided to explore the perimeter. I remember that the frozen ground was crusty under my feet. The grass was neatly trimmed but brown and dormant. We walked down into the field by an old red barn and a creek. Pink clouds rose from the hills with the morning sun and the creek hummed with a gentle bubble and gurgle of water on the rocks. We walked around the old stone walls, past the creek and up to the other side of the farmhouse. The house was a light yellow with white trim. It was not freshly painted but was recently done. The front and side porch looked rebuilt and there was a stately white fence that ran more than two hundred feet by the road from one end of the property to the other. From the outside, the house looked impressive. I was stunned at how peaceful and enveloping the surrounding area was.
On three sides, the house was boarded by old vacant farm fields and on the fourth was the creek and a patch of wetlands. We couldn’t see into the house because of drawn cellular blinds on all of the first floor windows. We would be inside soon enough.
Except, actually we wouldn’t. I would but my wife would not. Within the next several hours, I would put an offer in on this house, all without my wife having seen an inch of the inside.
The Round Hill House 