We waited, and eventually got our answer from the owner. He wanted full asking price and not a penny less.
This just didn’t quite sit well with us. We had never been impulsive buyers, never getting our hearts set on one thing, house or otherwise, to the point of ignoring the price. And while the price difference between what he was asking and what we offered was small, there was just something about working with someone who didn’t seem to want to play ball at all, so to speak, that just curbed our enthusiasm a bit.
We thought about it for a while. Our move there would not be immediate, there were other lots we liked almost as well that were available, and attractive houses with generous yards could be found all up and down the Pasquotank, so we reasoned that an acceptable lot or house would be easy to find whenever we were ready.
After some deliberation, we decided to wait a few months, to see if our feelings or the owner’s would change. In the interim, we began preparing for the coming baby. LCB researched baby gear, and I researched ways to not throw up at work.
We made it through the holidays, announcing both my pregnancy and our plan to eventually relocate to our families and friends. To my parents, LCB apologized and confessed that he’d “knocked up their daughter,†and for his family, he nonchalantly slipped in the news in the middle of the blessing over Christmas dinner. With the baby, everyone was naturally thrilled. With the news of our relocation, which would not be due to our careers, everyone was painstakingly polite, which was a clear indication that they thought we were officially a few cards short of a full deck. And from their perspective, this was an understandable viewpoint. “So, what’s in Elizabeth City?†they asked, a bit puzzled. “Well, other than warmer weather, an abundance of water, and proximity to the ocean, not much. But that’s sort of the point,†was our typical response, to which we received poorly-masked looks of confusion.
As I moved out of first trimester exhaustion and we began to spend more time reassessing our destination, one nagging question began to surface.
In Elizabeth City, we could have the house of our dreams, on a waterfront lot.
But it was still an hour’s drive to the Atlantic.
This was immensely better than what we currently had, but still. We were going to uproot our whole lives, so were we really getting what we ultimately wanted in exchange for all the upheaval we were going to have to trudge through?
We weren’t entirely sure.
Then, a couple of other interesting things happened.
First, LCB stumbled on some potentially promising business opportunities in the Chicagoland area that would make staying there longer advantageous. They were things that could ultimately lead to LCB’s goal to work for himself, and financially, they could add to the nest egg we were saving for Carolina. But, we knew they also might mean sticking around Chicago for a few more years.
Then, in March, now well into my second trimester and with all the renewed energy that not throwing up with regularity brings, I found a house for sale about five minutes down the road from us that was, in essence, our dream house. It came with, among other things, a sad but moving story surrounding the construction of the house, the extra space we needed as we expanded our family, all the charm a house could possibly have, and a creek running through the back yard.
It was the house that all my childhood reading and rereading of the Anne of Green Gables series had taught me to dream of.
It was a storybook house, my Anne of Green Gables house, come to life and, very possibly, within our reach.