old / new house

When we moved into our first house on Coral Harbor in 2003 we didn't expect to be there long.  We thought we would maybe be there for the four years of Matt's residency training and then move on due to being in the military.  It ended up that because of the specialty Matt chose we would be moving back to San Antonio after a fellowship in North Carolina, so we decided to keep the house as a rental so we could move back in after fellowship.  We revised our plans to live there for a few more years to save money and when Kylee was getting ready to go to middle school we would move.  Though we loved our elementary school, the middle and high schools for which we were zoned were not great. 

When Matt and I started looking at houses, we knew it would be a while before we were in the market to buy one.  We wanted to find the perfect house in the best location and were prepared to take several years to look.  We narrowed down a few neighborhoods that we wanted to be in.   We were pretty low key for our realtor.  He didn't really look for houses for us, he would send us all the houses for sale within the area and price we wanted. We would look at all of them and we would let him know the houses that we were interested in seeing.  He would make the appointments and we would go check them out.  If the house was great, the yard wasn't.  Some of the houses had great yards, but not enough bathrooms.  I was surprised at how many houses that were pretty good size and only had 2 full bathrooms.  Matt had seen a house that he liked listed in October and he liked it.  He decided in December to see if it was still on the market.  It was, so we decided to check it out.  The minute we stepped in, I liked it.  The more we looked the more we realized it had all the things we had been looking for.  Everything was great.  There were many things it had that we hadn't seen in other houses.  We decided that evening to put an offer on it. It had been on the market several months so we were discussing how much less to offer when our realtor called.   The seller's agent had told him there were 2 other offers.  Worried we would miss out on the only house in nearly two years of looking that had almost exactly what we wanted, we offered 5 thousand more than the list price.  We were thrilled when it was accepted.