Fuk you Gawy Miwwerrr... I did buy a house!
https://www.myvisuallistings.com/pfs/263856I should probably think about selling my existing house now.
tl;dr... bought a house, moving in Feb 28th
The story:
With the jingle.kids off to school, mrs.jingle and I had always known there was nothing holding us to the city where we live and planned to move shortly after they went off to school. We love our house and property, but the city is turning to the shits - growing way too fast is causing a lot of other problems. Ever since jingle.daughter's car accident in June, we've really noticed how dangerous driving is around here, crime is getting really bad, the infrastructure can't support the growth, and we have a huge south-asian population (like, greater than 50%), many who don't seem to adapt to Canadian culture very well (eg, terrible drivers). I could make an entire huge-assed post just about how much I hate this city and can't get out fast enough, but I digress.
So this summer, we started casually looking around at houses in the Niagara region (somewhat close to where jingle.daughter is going to school - which would give her the option of living at home come 2nd year). Mrs.jingle is committed (professionally) to staying here in our city until the end of October, so we aren't ready to sell our house until then. But, we were definitely wanting to buy first, since this will (hopefully) be our 30-year home to live and grow old in together. We were just looking to get a sense of what we liked/didn't like, where we liked/didn't like, what we could get for our budget etc... Unless we found the
perfect house, we really weren't wanting to buy/move until after Christmas. Turns out, we found the perfect house. One of our goals is that we were looking for a place that would be part way between the two schools that the jingle.kids were going to. The only knock on this house is that it isn't that - it's further away from jingle.son, while still being relatively close enough to jingle.daughter that she could commute.
Absolutely love the house, huge/gorgeous property, move-in ready, end of Feb closing. It's 5-minutes from the border in Buffalo (hence the big Sabres man-cave (none of which stays). Pretty much all the stars aligned for us here. After we saw this one, everything else paled in comparison - and a lot of places we saw were absolute tripe for the price that was being asked. When we finally came to the realization that everything else we saw was a house, but this place felt like a home... we knew we found our place.
So, time to start getting the current jingle.house in shape to be sold. Nothing major... a few minor touchups, and a lot of de-cluttering.