House-Hunting While Autistic, Part 2: The Search Process

This is the second in a series about my experience of finding a house.  (Part 1 is here, this is part 2, part 3 is here, part 4 is here)  As I'm autistic, the process proved to be a bit more challenging than it would be for most people.  Last week I covered why we decided to buy a house, and what things we opted to look for, given my disabilities and challenges.  This week I'll be covering the actual search process.

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We opted to house-hunt in the winter.  This was more due to the fact that winter was when we were ready to hunt, rather than any conscious choice.  I had, in fact, agitated to start hunting a lot earlier in the year, but nothing came of it.  Winter, however, is when houses go up for sale for financial reasons, so it wasn't the worst possible decision.  It can, however, make the inspection difficult, since foundations are hard to inspect when they're buried under 2 feet of snow.

Despite the inspection problems, winter was possibly the best season for us to be shopping in... not because it's ideal as a season, but because of our particular housing market.  In most housing markets, the homes go up for sale, and if they're well-priced and immediately livable, they might go off the market in a week or two.  In this housing market?  That same house would go up for sale and be gone by the end of the day.  Three days, tops.  Any home that didn't disappear within a week or two, in this market, had something wrong with it. 

Once we had our list of criteria, including the bare minimum, preferred criteria, and ideal criteria, we went about trying to find a realtor.  Apparently, these days you can opt to work with several realtors without a contract, but because of my social difficulties and lack of energy, we stopped as soon as we found one that we liked.  That was, thankfully, the very first one.  Chris found out about her through someone at his workplace, and got into contact with her.  She was a sweetheart, and relatively laid back and hard working.

A Poor Start

She had us send her the criteria we'd developed, and later, the spreadsheet we put together to rate homes.  Using that, she narrowed down the various homes listed in our search area, and had several options for us to look over.  We got started almost immediately, attending an open house on a nice little house, and then seeing another one afterwards.

All this happened relatively quickly, faster, in fact, than our pre-approval letter from the bank.  So we ended up seeing several houses, and absolutely loved the very first one we saw.  It had a lot of open space, and a public and private area of the home, along with a sunroom and everything we wanted on the "preferred" list.  It was also distinctive, and not too large.  But we couldn't put an offer on it (we thought) because we didn't have that pre-approval letter.

This ended up being a source of intense frustration for us, because as it turns out, even with us house-hunting in winter, the housing market in our area is completely insane.  In the dead of winter, which is the off-season for house hunting.  Can you imagine what it must be like in the spring and summer?  By the end of the day, that house we loved was off the market and gone.  I was extremely frustrated, and fairly sure we wouldn't be able to find anything else like it.

I took that negative attitude into the next weeks of showings. All things considered, it wasn't the worst thing I could have done.  Almost all of the homes we saw in that time were inappropriate for our needs, or had problems that would have required fixing.  One of them, less than 15 years old, was so badly battered that we couldn't imagine living there.  Another, built in the 1920s or '30s, had such narrow hallways that I felt as though I wouldn't fit.  Yet another had the garage entryway dumping you almost directly down a flight of stairs into the basement, which I could almost guarantee would end in my going to the hospital within 2 years.

The Grind

Perhaps what contributed most to keeping that negative attitude, though, was the fact that there was no rest from the house-hunting.  Any available time we had was spent looking at houses, or arranging showings, or looking at house-listings.  This was not merely because we were in a hurry to ditch our apartment complex.  If a promising home went up for sale, and we didn't see it that day or the next, it would be gone.  That was the reality, and we'd already seen it happen with the very first house we saw.

I was still worn out from Christmas, in addition, so the experience was extremely exhausting and bad for my sanity, to say the least.  Checking out each home reminded me somewhat of job-hunting, where you mentally "try on" each job to see if you think you'd be able to do it and enjoy it.  Each house we saw, I had to mentally imagine myself living there, taking the groceries in, doing laundry, going to bed for the night.  Doing this twice a day, sometimes, every day, for weeks, is not an experience I would consider fun.

In truth, all this travel, imagining, marking checklists, and inspecting wore me right down to the breaking point.  I started having to tell my spouse to only message me listings at certain times, and to not bother me with ones he wasn't sure about.  I became snappish and withdrawn.  I stopped working on this blog much, and stopped seeing friends.  I stopped doing anything productive outside of my blog, as well, and spent a lot of time in bed, doing close to nothing.  In retrospect, I was basically defaulting to self-care, reading webcomics I enjoyed and comforting books where the good guy wins in the end... but at the time, it felt like I was just being a useless lump.

After the initial barrage, what remained on the market were homes that had things majorly wrong with them, and the occasional fresh home that went up on the market.  Looking back over my notes and the various spreadsheets, I think we saw fewer than 25 homes in total.  Which I suppose says something about my tolerance, or lack thereof, for the entire enterprise.  Most of these homes that we saw didn't really interest us, but we went to see them in case they were more than the pictures seemed to show.  Mostly, they would be summarized by, "It's just a house, like every other house." Having seen that first house, which was really, truly special, I couldn't be satisfied with "just a house."

Or at least, not until the weariness of seeing one house after the next, after the next, after the next, struck me.  We had almost decided to put in an offer on a smallish, fenced in yard house.  It had some eccentricities and some slight water damage, but otherwise seemed acceptable, if not really amazing.  But my trip to Washington DC was coming up, so we weren't committing to anything... and then a condominium went up on the market.

Finding That One Place

It was awful timing, really.  I needed to pack for the trip, and mentally prepare for the rigors of travel and the reviewing process.  I had only just finished the written reviews for the trip.  Still, the place seemed promising... so once again, I dropped everything to go to see the place.  Condominiums in particular tend to go quickly, so it was dropping everything, or missing out on seeing the place.

It turned out to be fairly spacious.  The driveway was strange, and crooked.  But the place met the vast majority of our criteria.  The appliances were all in good condition, the condominium fee was reasonable, and the house itself was built the same year I was born.  It had good water pressure, and a view of a pond out the back window, along with various trees and just enough nature to be pretty.

What caught our attention most, though, was that it came with two things we'd really wanted but couldn't reasonably put on a required list: a fireplace, and a hot tub. These two features were on the luxury list, and we hadn't reasonably expected to have them in our home. But here they were, a gas fireplace (albeit of an older design), and a one person hot tub.

I don't think we were so hasty as to decide to put an offer on it during the showing, but since I was leaving the very next day, we did decide to do so that same day.  The resulting mess (because frankly that's all I can reasonably call it) will be described next week...