Back to School...Well, Sorta!

After my 3 weeks of summer I was ready to head back to school to help out for a few days. Today was my first day back and I can honestly say - this job is the reason Dave and I live in NY and we haven't moved. I work with an amazingly supportive staff and everyone is in it for the kids and their best interest. After working in a NYC public school I can say this is not always the case.

Today we worked on making the school schedule. Wow - such a headache! I can honestly say my brain is mush after staring at a computer screen all day. On the upside of the day - I got to see some of my little ones! They are in summer school right now and it was wonderful getting hugs and smiles from them. I will be in the next few days interviewing potential teachers. Fun fun!

As for the house hunt - Dave and I are thinking about waiting a few more months, saving more money, seeing if the market drops, and getting in to a higher price point bracket. Whatever the news says isn't true here in Westchester - the market is not dropping yet. We will wait and see...

Withdrawing Our Offer

After lots of discussion and thinking we have decided to withdraw our offer on the 2nd house. We will just keep looking...

House Hunting

The house hunting story
We began our house search a few weeks before our wedding by going to open houses. We first stared by looking at co-ops. For those of you not familiar with co-ops - they are like apartments that you own in large complexes with shared amenities (pool, fitness room, etc.). We soon realized that co-ops were not what we were interested in. Even though they are a lot cheaper you have shared walls and instead of owning the land you own shares of the larger property.
After the wedding we kept up going to open houses and changed our search to condos. These are usually townhouses and have a small yard and parking. To back up: our major non-negotiables are: parking, laundry, outdoor space, and a dishwasher. I know some of these things seem silly to list, but here in the suburbs of NYC these things are what push the prices up.

During one of our open houses we met a realator that we liked and contacted her to work with us on the rest of our search. Our first weekend out we focused on the area near the Hudson River . We liked Tarrytown but there weren't any houses that we loved and the commute would be long for both Dave and me. We decided to keep looking in other parts of the county.

Somehow we began looking very close to the CT border in Rye Brook, Rye, and Port Chester. This area is a stones throw from the CT border and would be less than 15 minutes for Dave to get to work. It would be about 35 min. for me (only about 10 more than I do now).

We looked, looked, looked..and found this house:

It is a 3 bedroom 2 bath house, hardwood floors, central AC, 2 car garage, and a finished basement.
When we saw it it had only been on the market for 10 days. We decided we wanted to make an offer.
We saw it on Sunday and put in our offer on Monday morning - unfortunately, someone else had put in an offer on Sunday.
We found out 2 weeks later that we didn't get the house. It turns out that even though our offer was the higher offer the sellers were getting a buy-out package from a relocation company (the husband's company was moving them) and they just wanted the house bought quickly.
Oh well, back to the search...

This past weekend we continued to look in Rye Brook and we found this house:
It is a 3 bedroom 1.5 bath house, hardwood floors, a sun room, deck, and big backyard (my favorite part of the house).


We put an offer in on Sunday night and we are waiting to hear from the sellers if they are going to accept or counter it.


We are just waiting...