Aurel's laurels

It is sometime since I have written and a lot of water has passed under our bridge.

Sunday we saw seven or eight houses in South Etobicoke and Mimico, sometimes in light rain.

Monday we made an offer on Heintzman, stuck to our price and were outbidded by twenty seven thousand dollars. They must really have wanted it as there were still some essential repairs very obvious on our second viewing.

Leeanne continued to impress us.

We were sad to lose it as we had gotten to like the area a lot and even enjoyed the low rumble of slow freight trains at the top of the street. By then, we were exhausted and somewhat discouraged. Cathy had also been looking at rentals and realised how lucky we had been here to pay so little for three and a half bedrooms.

Tuesday we stayed home and I spent the whole evening picking properties from The East end MLS listings and pinning them on Google Earth. Three of them had already sold.

Cathy picked a house in Etobicoke and I met her last night at Islington station in the rain to see it and others in the area and some in the East End.

We had agreed that we would rather have less, finished and ready to move into, than more, which we would have to fix up. Cathy felt we could afford more than we had at first calculated and was encouraged by her boss to do that. Of course the more you invest, the more you profit (if there is one) when you sell.

That first home was modern, roomy and rather cooky as I called it. We fell in love. I suggested we offer a thousand more than their asking price, but Leeanne said, no, offer low and wait for them to drop their price, we agreed we could at least rise to what we had offered on Heintzman.

They refused our lower offer and countered one thousand over what Leanne had said would be their counter offer. We jumped ten thousand and they still refused dropping six below asking. This was more than we had envisioned, we could have offered two more but decided to meet their three thousand increase on our second offer. We were quite tired sitting for long stretches in the car in the rain.

The whole thing is conditional to getting the financing in place by an extension to next week,(Monday is a holiday).

We were excited and apprehensive. Our life will change a lot and so will Matthew and William's. Even David will not be round the corner anymore. It will take me a long time to get to work, but I have already been lightly offered a ride in and a co-worker told me the train and bus and subway route, which would be faster, would only cost another 120 a month.

I'm going to be a commuter and live in the burbs. And at sixty two I'm a first time home buyer.

Incidentally, they had listed previously sixteen thousand higher. Nevertheless I know we paid a bit high compared to other sales on the street, but, "what is a few thousand over twenty five years", we said to ourselves.