Searching - Part 3

I was out walking the dog, on a warm Sunday afternoon, a few months after Dave and I had talked about buying Mr. D’s property and deciding it would not work. It was a perfect spring day, when the sun is shining but it’s not too hot, and warm southerly breezes bring with them the clean smell of the ocean just a few hundred feet away. I walked by Mr. D’s house, took a good, long look at it, and I knew that it was mine. I HAD to have it. We would make it work. It was the opportunity of a lifetime to be able to build in our neighborhood, and I wasn’t going to let it pass us by without a really good, drag-out, hair-pulling, bitch-slapping, bloody, messy fight.

The next door neighbors happened to be outside and I stopped to talk to them, something I’ve been doing for almost six years since they moved here. They were doing some work to their garage to turn it into a studio space for Chris, a children’s book illustrator, so we talked about the progress of their renovations and they showed me around the inside. At one point, either Chris or his wife Anika, a children's book author, asked me, “So are you buying the place next door, or what?” I had previously mentioned to them my interest in the house, so they knew our whole story up to this point. I told them how weird the timing of that question was, as I had just minutes ago got the feeling that I HAD to get that house. I explained the situation of needing a variance to make it work for us and the fear we had of buying the property and then not getting the variance, leaving us holding a lot we couldn’t build on. They both said that they would do anything they could to help us, and that they would really love to have us as neighbors and “Damnit, you should just buy it!” That 20 minute conversation helped strengthen my resolve that this was meant to be, and I formed my plan of attack during the remainder of the walk.

I decided that I would first call the listing agent to see if there were any pending offers before I tried to rally the troops (aka. Dave, the pessimistic architect). On Monday morning, MaryBeth informed me that there had been three offers that were either rejected or fell-through and that at the moment there was no active interest on the property. I let her know my plan… discuss/demand/plead with Dave to take another look at the possibility of the property. If he was willing to think about it more, we would take some time to make sure it would work for us with some very rough, preliminary sketches and then decide to make an offer or not. I let her know that I’d probably need a few weeks to see what we would decide, and that I would call her as soon as I had an answer one way or the other. But, I smartly told her to call me immediately if an another offer happened to be made while we were deciding.

Monday night I discussed/demanded/pleaded with Dave, who pretty quickly said, “OK. Let’s look at it again.” I didn’t even have to bitch-slap him – kind of disappointing. He spent the next few days, with his head buried in architecture books, and I knew better than to ask any questions and just let him do his thing. On Wednesday night after going to bed, he got up again and went upstairs to the studio. He was gone a while and I knew that inspiration had struck. I fell back asleep. The next morning, I found the sketch upstairs… the sketch that began to solve the problem of fitting a well-designed, modern house onto a very tiny piece of property.

It was beginning to look to good for us. It was beginning to seem possible. But we felt we still needed some more time to be sure.

After one phone call at 6pm Friday evening, time was exactly what we would not have.