Pardon me, this street is blocked, we are moving

I've previously discussed my fondness for open houses... we're not exactly looking to move, but I'm always keeping an eye open for a good bargain. Such a deal does not really seem to exist these days, but it doesn't stop me from checking MLS every once in a while.

Anyway, the house I discussed in that post has now sold.... no one has moved in, but the new owners have been periodically stopping by the house to do some work. The hubs went over two weeks ago to chat and found out that they paid a rather astronomical amount for the house only to decide to tear it down and build a brand new (monster) house. When I heard this, I was shocked - I suppose it's just the reality of housing around here, it makes more sense for people to buy for land value only when the houses are old, even when they are renovated.

Hubby and I came up with an idea though... we thought hey, maybe we should ask them if they want to trade houses. After all, our house is also an older house, and it's only a little bit smaller than theirs, and our lot is almost the same size. The bonus to us would be living in a newly renovated, slightly larger house, meaning it would buy us some time before having to "move up" or rebuild... and if we decided to rebuild later, we'd still have that big lot in a good neighbourhood. I'm not sure what the bonus to them would be, but let's just call it even for them... they'd still have a good lot on which to build their monster house.

We laughed about the idea, but at the same time we thought it was an awesome idea. We would gain an extra family room and I think also an extra bathroom... we wouldn't have to worry about repainting the exterior or fixing the roof as I believe those were both new... we would have laminate flooring and wouldn't have to look at carpet where I spilled an entire pitcher of juice... AND moving costs would be super low. All we would need is a few friends to form an assembly line across the street, and a dolly on which to wheel our furniture out our old driveway and into our NEW driveway. (They even face each other!) Forget putting things in boxes, we'll just carry them across. I can't think of a better way to move.

It wasn't until this weekend that we spotted them again though, and I asked the hubby to go over and canvass the idea with them. He was gone for some time and I started to get myself worked up over our move. Heh. Turns out, the owner would have been interested, but unfortunately they've already disconnected everything in the house and begun their teardown process. He said it was too bad we hadn't asked him a few weeks earlier. He told the hubby that he didn't even care what the house looked like when he bought it, since he was only interested in tearing it down. He also mentioned that if we were thinking of selling or renovating, he had friends who would be willing to buy, and renovating would be useless. Later we saw him in the window staring at our house. I'd like to think he was looking with some regret that he didn't just come up with the trading idea on his own (since he probably would have paid less for our house) ... but probably he was just thinking to himself, what kind of weirdo offers to trade houses!

Alas, there is no need to change your address books for the moment. Nor will you be confused by having to turn left into the driveway rather than right. I can't pretend I'm not a little disappointed though. Cordoning off our street for our one hour move would have been fun.