It turns out that the house isn’t to be mine, after all, and I’m okay with that.

The inspection was Saturday afternoon, and my Realtor and I both went so we could see what the inspector found. I also wanted to take pictures and measurements. This meant that I was spending nearly two hours in the place. While I was seeing things I liked about it, I was also seeing some things I found a little unsettling. One of those was the house next door. When I looked out one of the upstairs windows that faced that house, I could see that it was in really bad shape, with holes in the outside walls, including one up under the eaves. My inspector even glanced over there and commented on it. They probably have a colony of either squirrels, raccoons, or bats living in that attic.

I also started noticing how narrow the doors were. In my online furniture shopping, I’d seen that they had a note about how the doorway had to be at least 32 inches for them to deliver a sofa, and when I measured I found that the front door and the living room door were only 31 inches wide. They must have had to deliver everything through the back door, which was wider, but which required going up some pretty steep steps from the deck. I noticed that the section of fence between the side yard and back yard by that part of the deck had been removed and was leaning against the side fence.

The inspection report wasn’t utterly alarming. The biggest worry for me was the fact that the roof was original to the house, which was built in 1900. It’s a tin roof, so I guess it doesn’t wear out like modern shingles do, but a number of the tin panels are bent, so wind and water can get up under them. The inspector recommended getting a tin roof expert to look at it and see what needed to be repaired. The basement was just a crawl space, not an actual basement, though it did have things like the water heater and interior unit for the air conditioner and heater in there. The floor was dirt, and the dirt from when it was excavated was piled up against one of the walls. The inspector suggested getting the basement sealed to prevent mold, bugs, etc., from getting in. He also said the house needed new rain gutters. He thought the basement stairs and back stairs to the deck needed to be replaced and were too steep, so they were unsafe.

The thing that I found a bit concerning that I hadn’t even considered was that there’s a big tree on the neighbor’s side of the property line that’s too close to both houses. It’s just about at the back end of the houses, barely five feet from both houses. A lot of that tree’s branches hang over what would have been my house’s roof, and he said a tree that tall would have a root system that could encroach on my basement or undermine my foundation, and if that tree fell in a windstorm, depending on how it fell it would either fall between the houses, so the branches would hit what would have been my bedroom; it would fall away from both houses, so the roots would come up under the rear corner of my house; it would fall on the neighbor’s house so the roots would dig up my basement; or it would fall on my house. He suggested getting together with the neighbor to have the tree removed because a tree that size shouldn’t be within ten feet of a house.

Once the inspector left, my Realtor and I were walking around, looking at the things he pointed out. Her husband’s a contractor, so she knows a lot about how to get stuff like that done, and we were trying to figure out what we might be able to ask the seller to fix and how much it would cost to fix the other stuff. The tree was a big question mark because it’s on the neighbor’s property, and given the condition of that building, we weren’t sure I could get the neighbor to do anything. While we were standing outside, I smelled smoke and commented that someone had their fireplace going. Then my Realtor noticed smoke coming from near the house next door.

She looked and saw that the leaves on the ground in front of that house were burning, and there was a kid nearby. She went into Mom mode and ran over to make sure the kid was okay. He just looked at her, shrugged, and said, “I like starting fires.”

My Realtor looked at me and mouthed, “Oh, no.” We noted then that the house next door had been divided into apartments. That meant there was probably a non-resident landlord, and he clearly didn’t care for maintaining the place, so tracking him down to get the tree dealt with wouldn’t be easy. I might not even be able to get anything done if the tree actually fell on my place. I’d have to find out who the owner was and find a way to contact him. Beyond that, I wasn’t super keen on living next door to a poorly maintained apartment building that houses a kid who likes to start fires. Even aside from the fires, those houses have street parking (since they were built before cars were common), and if there are three families in one building, that means they take up a lot of parking. They were parked in front of what would have been my house, so I might not always have been able to park at my house.

The Realtor apologized for not having noticed all this before I paid for the inspection. She said I couldn’t cancel the contract based on the neighbors, but there was enough in the inspection report to give me grounds to back out. That was what I decided to do because the roof plus the gutters plus the basement, plus the steps, plus the tree added to the neighboring house and the kid who likes to start fires was all too much.

Oddly, this came as a huge relief. I did like a lot about the house. I’ve loved the idea of living in a Victorian home since I was a kid. But I think I was trying to force it. I was so eager about finding a place and getting that worry out of the way (since the market is pretty tight) that I jumped at something that would kind of work and ignored the vague sense of disappointment underlying it because it never felt right. I have this sense of my home in my head, and no matter how much I tried mentally arranging my furniture in this house and no matter how much online shopping I did for furnishings, I never managed to make this house the house in my head. The head house refused to be replaced, and I felt a sense of loss for not having the head house, if that makes any sense. The moment I had a good reason not to take this house, I felt so much better.

I learned so much from that inspection, though. I have a really good checklist of things to look for before I go so far as to make an offer. I know I need to spend a lot more time in the house before I decide. I need to walk the block and around to the block behind to get a sense of the neighborhood. I did drive down that street, but it’s a narrow street on a hill, so I didn’t notice the three mailboxes on the front of that house next door while I had my eyes on the road. I need to walk it to get a good sense of what’s there and what the neighborhood feels like. I’ve been driving around the neighborhoods I like at various times and had never considered this one, so I need to explore it a bit more.

This means I won’t be having to move right away, so I need to buckle down and work on my writing in the meantime. I’ll probably start the serious house hunting after Thanksgiving. I have until May to move out of this apartment, and I can always go month-to-month if I have to after that.

I’ve been pretty distracted the past few days, not by the big national stuff, but by a house.

My plan upon moving here was to rent an apartment for a year while I decided if I like it here, and then sometime after the holidays start house hunting to buy a new place. The weekend before last, I took my first step in preparing for that by going to an open house just to meet the Realtor. The plan was to do that several times and then pick a Realtor. But I really hit it off with this one, and last week she was already sending me listings based on what I said I was looking for. Friday morning, she sent me one that I couldn’t pass up. She arranged to show it to me on Sunday afternoon, and it was eerily close to perfect. There are a few things about it that I would prefer to be different, but it has other features I hadn’t considered.

It’s basically a Victorian dollhouse cottage, built in 1900, but the interior has been remodeled fairly recently. It still has the original wood floors, a lot of the woodwork, the stairs, and the interior doors, but it looks like they’ve pretty much gutted it and redone the wiring and plumbing and created new closets in the bedrooms. They took out the wall between the dining room and kitchen, so it’s a nice open space. It has a modern kitchen and bathrooms, plus central air and heat, which is rare in a house that old. It’s the best of both worlds, with modern functionality and vintage aesthetic. It’s in a neighborhood near downtown and near a small park. The neighborhood looks kind of like San Francisco, with rows of Victorian homes on steep hills. As a plus, the back deck and back upstairs windows have a view of mountains. And it was less expensive than I’d budgeted for.

It seems weird to buy the first house I’ve looked at, but I felt like I couldn’t pass it up, so I put in an offer. I’ve spent the last couple of days waiting to hear if they accepted it. My Realtor said today that we should have all the signatures tomorrow. Then we’ll schedule an inspection because I don’t want to buy a house that old without knowing what I’m getting into. I’m cautiously optimistic that it’s going to happen. I’d be closing in early December, so I may be able to move in by Christmas — or at least start moving in. Since I’m just moving across town and I have time on my lease, what I may do is see if I can have the furniture and major stuff moved so I can start living there, and then I can gradually move the other stuff over, putting it away exactly where I want it as I go. That’s a bit less overwhelming than having to have everything packed all at once and then having a stack of boxes to deal with.

But this means I may have to delay the release of Rydding Village book 3. I hope to have a draft done before I close on the house and start moving, but then life will be chaos for about a month before I have a chance to revise and edit it. Even if it falls through, either because someone swooped in and outbid me or they find something scary in the inspection, I’m not sure when I’d be ready to publish because I need to let it rest a bit before I can revise and edit. I’m making a more realistic publishing/work schedule for next year. It will help that I shouldn’t have any major moves popping in.

While the move happening a few months earlier than I planned is a bit stressful, in a way, it’ll be nice to have it over with. I’ve been living on the verge of maybe moving soon for nearly a decade. It was about eight or nine years ago that I first decided that I wanted a different house, but at first I was thinking it would be in my same neighborhood. I started living with the idea of moving, saving as much money as possible and not buying stuff I would have to move, living with things that were wearing out with the idea that I’d get rid of them when I moved and replace them in the new home. It was about five years ago that I started thinking of moving to a different part of the country, and about three years ago that I started researching this area. Then there was the actual move this year, and I’ve been living where I am now with the idea that it was temporary, so buying as little as possible, not really getting set up in an optimized way because what’s the point when I’d be moving again. I just put things away to get them out of the way. It’ll be nice to get somewhere where I can truly settle. I’ll have to get some furniture and I’ll gradually figure out how I’m going to decorate, but at least I’ll be home

Assuming it all comes through. I’ve decided I’d be okay if the deal falls apart, but I’ll be glad if it doesn’t. It’s rare to find an older home in this price range that’s already been updated. It’s not exactly what I’ve been imagining, not the neighborhood I’ve been researching, but it may actually be more convenient to downtown. I guess I just hadn’t considered it because I didn’t walk around there when I visited last year, but when a friend drove me around town to orient me, she took me through that neighborhood and said it would be a good place to look. Apparently, it’s where a lot of the artsy types live. The people across the street have pink and purple hair and are really nice (I met them when I was looking at the house and asked them questions about the neighborhood).

Now I’m going to try to focus on writing instead of doing online searches for rugs and sofas and furniture for the front porch.