On again, off again

We spent today telling people at church that this isn't our last Sunday with the ward after all.

We had all Summer to find a house we liked.  We looked all over Austin.  Exhaustively, up near where we are, and less exhaustively elsewhere.  Besides Round Rock,  the other good school district is Eanes, which is mostly out of our price range.

Turns out that the set of houses with five bedrooms and a study and a good backyard and near both good elementary and middle schools and reasonably close to restaurants and activities and not substantially farther from my office and the airport is ... pretty much nothing.  We visited over a dozen houses to buy or rent, and looked at many more online, and came up empty.

So we looked in San Antonio, where we still have a lot of friends.  We drove down twice, seeing about ten houses each time--no mean feat with four kids in tow--and narrowed it down to two in the same neighborhood.  Both were fifteen minutes from the airport in one direction, and ten minutes from the temple in another.  Ideal location.  One even had dual master bedrooms which would be ideal, since I'd like to use the fifth bedroom as a guest room.

We made an offer on the less expensive one, and after a little haggling, it was accepted.  It appraised at substantially over our offer, so I was feeling pretty good about it.

Meanwhile San Antonio's Northeast school district was dragging their feet getting back to us.  Finally they told us that they can't commit to anything without doing their own diagnostics on Isaac, but the best we could hope for was four hours per week of speech instruction in their preschools.  Compared to the ten per week we were looking at in Round Rock, that seemed pretty lackluster.

So we ended up walking away from the house.  Earnest money, loan application, title search, appraisal, inspection...  a lot of money to burn with nothing to show for it.  And I liked that house.  I had my heart set on being five minutes away from the table tennis club.

But, a new house just came on the market in the Round Rock district.  We'll have to do some work on it, and it's farther away from just about everything, but it will do for a couple years.  We'll probably get an ARM to save a little on the payment since we don't plan to stay after Isaac's done with preschool.

Worst case scenario, plan D would be staying where we are now for another year.

Either way, I need to change that flight that I booked leaving from SAT next week...