In the fall of 2006, Sheri and I started seriously looking for a house. The primary motivation for this was the impending arrival of our son. At first I thought that perhaps we could stay in the apartment for the first few months of our child's life, but having experienced those months, I must say that we did the right thing to buy the house first. Living in a small apartment with a demanding infant, plus working, plus house-hunting, would have been an incredible strain on the whole family.
The house-hunting experience itself was not without its false starts. We started looking in Sayreville, NJ, which appealed to me as an active little town that was convenient to transportation and had a lot of amenities within walking distance. But the real estate prices in Monmouth County turned out to be higher than I'd expected, and the only place that appealed to me and was potentially within our price range was a 60-year-old house on Main Street, just a block from the Borough Hall. It was a good place if you like real in-town living, but had its drawbacks as well. Sheri was very patient with me in going over the pros and cons, but the final deciding factor was that it was going to need a lot of renovation in the basement and attic before it could become the complete space that we needed. With most of our time and energy to be taken up by raising our child in the first year, this didn't seem like a good situation for us to place ourselves in. So I reluctantly said goodbye to Sayreville and started looking in more remote Sussex County, where our house money would go a lot farther.
After a few weekends of searching, we thought we'd found the right house: something with enough room for the two of us plus our child-to-be, and office space for us both (since we both work at home now). It was located in a nice residential neighborhood just off Route 206, not very close to any train stations (there are always sacrifices to be made) but quite convenient to the major highways. And the amount of money we were prepared to spend would buy us a larger house and more spacious yard than anything in the Sayreville area.
But all was not as perfect as it seemed with the first house. Despite the state of the housing market (very slow sales, with prices often being adjusted down), the owners refused to dicker at all on the price, even giving us a hard time about including any of the major appliances. We decided that we could live with the asking price and made our offer, but then the inspection brought more bad news. The septic system failed its inspection, and needed an estimated $15,000 worth of repairs in order to come up to code. The owners started giving us a hard time about how much they were willing to pay, and at that point we realized that we shouldn't be buying this house from those people, and it was back to square one.
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