Signed a Contract
For the past month, buying a house has felt less like a milestone and more like a contact sport. It started with optimism: open homes circled on the calendar, finance pre-approval in place, spreadsheets tracking recent sales. Then reality set in. We walked through properties where the real estate agent seemed far more interested in steering the deal toward a mate than in fielding our questions. We met a seller who had listed because her divorce court told her to, and she had no intention of selling. Every inspection, every negotiation, felt like pushing uphill against forces that had little to do with market value. Time and again, it seemed we were the only ones treating the process as a serious transaction. Some houses carried stories you could smell before you crossed the threshold. One was soaked in a decade of nicotine, with yellowed walls, sticky cabinetry, and an odour embedded deep in plaster and carpet. Another came with the casual disclosure that it had once been a meth lab,...