SF Saga: Perfection Discovered (pt 5)

This is the fifth of a six-part series on my San Francisco Real Estate Saga, a months-long period involving countless house tours, sleepless nights, gut-wrenching decisions, and a total of three separate moves. The goal is to give people a sense of what’s involved with buying real estate, no matter the location or price. In case you’ve missed them, be sure to check out the previous installments to get yourself caught up:

• Part 1: Mad Dash Real Estate Hunt
  
• Part 2: A Diamond in the Rough
• Part 3: Making an Aggressive Offer
• Part 4: Back in My Arms Again, But Do We Want It?

On with Part 5!

After a much-needed break for the holidays, we slowly eased ourselves back into the real estate hunt in January. We had moved from our temporary living situation at my family’s home into another temporary apartment in the city–a cute, furnished place in Noe Valley. While we weren’t yet in our “final” home, we were making progress!

Our realtor Tim was doing his part, sending us weekly emails listing homes within our price range that he called “maybes”. We passed on most of them, until sent a rare weekend email with the subject line “How could I have missed this one?” It was a beautiful condo in an updated Victorian building in our ideal neighborhood, right in our price range. And best of all, the HOA dues were a very reasonable $95/month. Compared with the last condo we seriously considered (which carried HOA dues of $500/month) this was a huge relief.

We hustled over to the open house. The location was perfect. The block was adorable. The common areas of the building were well-kept and attractive. And the condo itself? Well, it was kind of amazing:

You can’t really tell from any of the photos, but every detail was attended to in this place. It retained its lovely historic elements, but with all the modern conveniences you’d want (outlets!!).

We both were reluctant to get excited – we’d been through the emotional ups and downs too much to let our hearts get broken again. So we quietly walked home together.

M: The location is really great.

Me: Yeah, it kind of couldn’t be better.

M: Hmm…

[Walk, walk, walk]

Me: I liked the layout and the kitchen.

M: Yeah, it felt like a great use of space.

Me: Hmm…

By the time we’d gotten home we were full-out gushing. We loved the place – we couldn’t find a single flaw with it. We emailed Tim to ask him to get the disclosure package so we could start reviewing it, aiming to meet the Wednesday deadline for making an offer.

We went to bed cautiously excited.

But the next day, we woke up just plain cautious.

What was going on??

We had found a real contender for our perfect home – it had everything we were looking for, it was affordable, and yet we didn’t really want it.

As M got ready to leave for work, we drilled down to the root of the matter. We just didn’t know what our lives had in store 2 or 3 years down the road. We might still be in San Francisco, but we might also want to move. We might want a bigger place. We might want that money to invest in a new company. We just plain didn’t know, and even assuming we could rent out the place, the idea of tying up so much money into a home didn’t feel right.

Up to this point, we’d just blamed the houses – none of them were good enough. But now that we’d found the perfect place, we had to confront reality: we just plain weren’t ready.

And that’s ok. There’s no reason someone has to buy a house just because they can technically afford it. As I always say, buying a home is as much an emotional decision as it is a financial decision, and we weren’t ready to make the commitment to home ownership. So we decided to commit to being renters for the next year or two, until we had a clearer handle on our life direction. And honestly, it was a huge relief.