March 1 and today was a total beach day. 79 degrees and blue skies – it pretty much doesn’t get any better than that out here… Went for a nice bike ride today and actually got a little sunburned. Pretty surreal since a whole lot of the rest of the country is under snow or just generally crappy weather.

Anyway, I bought a house.

But I haven’t really bought it yet.

It’s a bit complicated – kind of like pretty much everything I do… So I went to a foreclosure auction on 11 Feb down at the Marriott by the Harbor. There was this one house in OB that came up for auction at the last minute, so I figured I’d give it a shot. I honestly thought I’d be completely outbid, since I had a personal limit on what I was willing to “spend”, but in the end I came out the winner and even within budget! I totally had the “Oh, man, I just bought a house – what am I thinking?” moment when I won the auction, too. Following the win, I spent a couple of hours filling out paperwork to formalize the auction, etc. It was really weird – I later went out to celebrate.

But I haven’t really bought it yet. That’s why I haven’t really written anything about the house or posted pix, etc…

The property was “subject to seller approval”. That means that no matter what the property auctions for, the seller has 15 business days to either accept or reject that auction price. Now, the seller in this case is the bank (since it’s foreclosed) and I think their best interest would be to get the property off of their books, pretty much regardless of the cost – especially in the current economic environment – but you never know. I briefly thought that the seller had accepted the offer when I received escrow papers from the independent escrow company, but that was totally a false alarm. Bummer.

Anyway, there’s still no word from the seller. I called up the auction house for a status update on whether the selling bank was serious or not and the auction house said, “oh yeah, that particular agent has been extremely busy the past week. I’m sure they’ll get to you in the next couple of days…” Hmmmmmmmm. Well, depending on whether you count President’s Day or not, 15 days are up either this Wednesday or Thursday, so I guess it’s all about to go down. By the way, if the seller doesn’t respond in the 15 day window, then the default answer is NO. That would be a big time bummer as I’d have to restart the whole looking for a home process. Fingers crossed for it to go thru – then I’ll post some sweet pix and begin to formulate the MASTER PLAN!