Lunch with Rich, Conference Call

So, Tuesday night Jake and I both felt pretty hesitant and nervous about buying the Hathaway house, and kind of about buying a house in general.  Jake emailed Rich to say that we'd like a few more days to think about it and that we'd also let him know of more houses we'd like to look at.

The next morning, Rich said that he'd still like to meet with us as planned, except without paperwork, just to chat.  He said that he figured we were getting cold feet and usually having a chat like this helped.  Jake and I said it'd be fine to still meet, but we both went into the meeting thinking that there was no way this would help or change our minds.  We were both pretty sure that the Hathaway house was definitely not for us.

We met at Culver's and had lunch there.  Rich said that back in 1972, when he and his wife had just made an offer on their first house (that was $23,000), he called his realtor in a panic and said, "Tear up the papers!  I don't know what I was thinking, we can't buy a house!"  His realtor then said, "Hey, let's just have breakfast together tomorrow morning and have a chat."  He talked about how this feeling of nervousness is completely normal--thinking that we can't possibly afford a house and that we'd go bankrupt, etc.  I told him we still really liked the Greenbriar house, and that I never got the same feeling at Hathaway that I did at Greenbriar (the feeling of "home").  He pointed out that it's because the folks at Greenbriar really worked hard to make it feel like home, and that Hathaway's owners clearly didn't.  Rich is great because he doesn't put pressure on us to do anything.  He just talked to us and answered our questions.  He really is great and I'm very grateful that we switched to him.  I don't think Dawn would have been able to talk us through things as well as he did.  Anyway, he restored our confidence and we left there thinking that yeah, we would still think about it for a day, but we were pretty sure we'd put an offer in.

Jake did some more research on Wednesday night and found out that the sellers actually finished the basement.  We had thought that they hadn't put any work into it.  Rich estimates that it was probably a $20,000+ job.  So Jake felt a lot better about their asking price after that and we'd offer $170,500.

On Wednesday night we also had a "conference call" with Melissa and Mike, mostly giving him advice about Cassandra.  I swear we're always talking to a member of the Betzold family.  During their conversation, Cassandra told Mike that she was talking with her brother on the phone because they're working on a project together (designing something for pianos).  We were still on that "conference call" with  Meliss and Mike, so I told him to tell her that he was on the phone with his siblings working on a project too.  hehehe.  Mike had sent a birthday present out in the mail to Cassandra: granola (an inside joke), "coupons" for things like help with her car, a temple trip, a movie, a day at the park, etc, and a card.  She texted him in the evening saying that she found flowers in her room, with no name on the card.  She was excited about it.  Asked Mike if he was responsible.  He said no and felt dumb that they weren't.  Then she told him more about "Mr. Colorado" and Mike's thinking, "How many boyfriends does this girl have?"  So he kind of ended the conversation after that.