What's in a house?

Late on Thursday, we found out that someone wanted to look at our house on Friday. Since the family is here in Mass. with me, we arranged for someone to go to the house and turn on all of the lights. Apparently there was a miscommunications between the prospects and their agent on when to arrive at the house. So, they looked around, talked to neighbors, talked to some more neighbors, and then were finally able to see the house. The talking to the neighbors must have worked since before the day was through, we had an offer for the house that we are accepting. The deal looks like it will go through, so we were in a much better state of mind today when seeing houses with the Mass. realtor. Not many houses in Mass. will work with contingent buyers, so selling the house takes that out of contention.

One very different thing about homes in this area vs. Richmond is that, for the most part, there is little work done to a home before putting it on the market. There were two notable exceptions, and both of them we are interested in. The first home has a weird bedroom configuration, so that we would need to give Jake a smaller bed or be very creative where we put his current one. The other home is higher priced than we want but is an 1850-era farmhouse with almost 11 acres of land. I am afraid of being bound to a home that large and with that much property, knowing almost no one in the area to share it with. It is perfect for entertaining, but will take so much work and money on weekends to maintain that we will be house-poor for a while. I'm not sure that is in our best interest, no matter how much we love the home itself. The homeowners have put tons of money into the property, all excellent investments. So, we will continue to look at properties, and will continue to decide on how much home we can afford.