A somewhat sad almost-anniversary post
Sep. 10th, 2010 10:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
missroseroseAs a few of you may have noticed, I've been keeping this blog for very nearly seven years now. And I'm very well aware that if you go back over many of the earlier entries, they're rather different in tone - drama-filled, all about relationships and feelings and problems. But gradually, as time went on, these became less and less prevalent; partially because my life settled down some, but mostly because I was getting older, and learning that [a] the world at large didn't care about my petty relationship problems and [b] maturity in our culture is in no small part measured by one's ability to keep one's private life private, and keep up the appearance of general affability on the surface. But if the world at large will forgive my slight lapse (and why wouldn't it, given that the world at large is hardly aware this blog exists?), I'm going to discard those rules, and talk about what's really on my mind.
This evening, we spent several hours in the company of the current owners of our dream home.
I will state for the record that I was against this idea from the start. We'd already seen the place (courtesy of the nice girls house sitting while the owners were in Fiji); we knew it was amazing, we knew we wanted it, we knew it was way, way out of our price range - so what was the point of spending more time mooning over something we couldn't afford? But Brian had his heart set on at least talking to them, so I agreed, despite my reservations that we'd be wasting their time.
The owners, despite being fairly wealthy, weren't snooty or pretentious at all. (In a way, it would've been better if they had, since then we could've walked away with no regrets.) They weren't even really giving us a sales pitch - they knew damn well the place would absolutely sell itself to the right person. Instead, we sat out in the terraced garden and drank wine and chatted for pretty much the entire evening - about Bisbee, about the other people who'd come to look at the place (none who really loved it the way the current owners do, according to their recounting), about the camping opportunities in the area, about Fiji water (surprise! It's not $3 a bottle in Fiji!), about the history of the place and the various improvements it's had over its hundred-year-plus lifespan. Heck, they even seemed to instinctively understand that for us a $400k house was probably not a possibility - while we didn't talk hard numbers, they told us more than once to please be honest with them and it was okay if it just wasn't going to work on our budget. And when we left (with a promise to meet again next weekend with some wine from Sonoita), they told us flat out they'd love to sell the place to a couple like us.
But, probably come Sunday, I'm going to have to compose an email admitting that yes, we love the place like whoa, but no, it's just not going to happen without some kind of financial miracle. And I'm sure they'll be more than gracious about it, and we'll still have a few more lovely evenings in the place (they talked seriously about getting together a dinner party with some of the prominent folks in Bisbee where they'd host, Brian could cook, I could mix drinks, and we'd get to know all of them), and then eventually they'll find someone well-off who likes the place and can afford it, and they'll head to Fiji permanently, and we'll find some other perfectly nice place to rent while we work on paying off our debts and saving up for a down payment on a more appropriately middle-class dwelling wherever we end up buying.
But it was lovely to pretend for an evening that it was a possibility.
This evening, we spent several hours in the company of the current owners of our dream home.
I will state for the record that I was against this idea from the start. We'd already seen the place (courtesy of the nice girls house sitting while the owners were in Fiji); we knew it was amazing, we knew we wanted it, we knew it was way, way out of our price range - so what was the point of spending more time mooning over something we couldn't afford? But Brian had his heart set on at least talking to them, so I agreed, despite my reservations that we'd be wasting their time.
The owners, despite being fairly wealthy, weren't snooty or pretentious at all. (In a way, it would've been better if they had, since then we could've walked away with no regrets.) They weren't even really giving us a sales pitch - they knew damn well the place would absolutely sell itself to the right person. Instead, we sat out in the terraced garden and drank wine and chatted for pretty much the entire evening - about Bisbee, about the other people who'd come to look at the place (none who really loved it the way the current owners do, according to their recounting), about the camping opportunities in the area, about Fiji water (surprise! It's not $3 a bottle in Fiji!), about the history of the place and the various improvements it's had over its hundred-year-plus lifespan. Heck, they even seemed to instinctively understand that for us a $400k house was probably not a possibility - while we didn't talk hard numbers, they told us more than once to please be honest with them and it was okay if it just wasn't going to work on our budget. And when we left (with a promise to meet again next weekend with some wine from Sonoita), they told us flat out they'd love to sell the place to a couple like us.
But, probably come Sunday, I'm going to have to compose an email admitting that yes, we love the place like whoa, but no, it's just not going to happen without some kind of financial miracle. And I'm sure they'll be more than gracious about it, and we'll still have a few more lovely evenings in the place (they talked seriously about getting together a dinner party with some of the prominent folks in Bisbee where they'd host, Brian could cook, I could mix drinks, and we'd get to know all of them), and then eventually they'll find someone well-off who likes the place and can afford it, and they'll head to Fiji permanently, and we'll find some other perfectly nice place to rent while we work on paying off our debts and saving up for a down payment on a more appropriately middle-class dwelling wherever we end up buying.
But it was lovely to pretend for an evening that it was a possibility.
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Date: 2010-09-12 03:29 pm (UTC)I did something similar with my dream house here. There was this house that just wasn't selling even after months and months on the market, and the house was AWESOME but we certainly didn't have the cash for it. I sent the owner an email telling her how much I loved it, telling her there's no way we could afford it ourselves, but that I wanted her to know that her house was beautiful and just keep the faith that it would sell eventually. She ended up inviting me over for tea! We chatted, I got to spend more time in the space and meet her geriatric but very sweet cat, and it was all and all just a lovely afternoon. They did eventually find a buyer. (Not us. We didn't magically come up with an extra 200K.) ~L.