#tomnevers

I've not blogged in a long time due to being ridiculously busy and having an arm injury.  Both things are still true, but both are improving, so I guess I need to return to normalcy.

After our Christmas break we contacted a realtor and a bank and started to look into buying a home on Nantucket.  We did this for several reasons:

Before we came to Nantucket we were interested in purchasing our next home.

The rental market here is awful.  There are not a lot of year 'round rentals and those who have them do not leave them.  Landlords who rent in the summer season can get anywhere from $2000/week+ (I've seen $20,000/week for some properties).  These people often don't want the hassle of having tenants in the off-season - but even if they do, you gotta move out for the summer unless you can pay summer rental rates.

If we don't want to be on the move constantly, we need to control our own housing. We had to buy.

The fun part about buying a home here is that if you don't like anything on the market you can  not buy and wait and see, or you can compromise.  You can't look in the next town over, and for most people, you can't wait forever unless  you have one of those precious year 'round leases.  

We knew that in order to make sure we were able to move in by mid-June we would want to make an offer by the end of February.  Did I mention we started looking in early January?  I think we looked at homes 3 or 4 Saturdays in a row.  We put together one offer that ended up being too late on one place, and then the next week put an offer on the house we are now buying.  We pretty much looked at EVERY home in our price range - which only totaled about 12.  In the last 4 weeks ZERO homes in our range have come on the market.

When banks compete, you win.  This is true.  We spoke with 4 banks and let them compete.  We very happy that the broker we liked best was able to match the lowest rates so we could work with her.

We ended up buying a house we avoided looking at for a few weeks because it was "out of the way".  Now, it's an island, how far away could it be, right?  But you live here long enough and you feel like 3 miles is a long distance and 6 is forever.  We now work about 1.3 miles from our rental home and most of our activities are within 2 miles of here.  It's amazing how small your world can get.

So, we're moving WAY out to Tom Nevers, known for it's terrible cell phone reception, relative quiet in any season(especially in the off-season), and large lots.  No, the airport is not Tom Nevers field (that was a former military air base in the area) but you can insert your "Wings" comment here. We chose to buy here because we loved the open space, the sound of the ocean and the realization that we wanted a place that looked like it was on Nantucket.  So many places we looked at were just another townhouse on a street that could be anywhere in New England.  We put more value on the size of our outdoor space than the indoor.  For two people who have a lot of stuff, this should be VERY interesting!