Move to New OrleansWe have our house, and it’s not where we expected

Searching for a home to buy is a pretty fascinating process, and it’s one of the reasons why I dig what I do. With few exceptions, it’s time-consuming, involves a lot of driving and demands lots of patience. But I find the odyssey from, “This is who we are, what we like to do, and how we live,” to, “This is our house,” to be a fun, fulfilling ride.

The search for our New Orleans home was all over the place. We were under contract on a new home in Leonidas, but the inspection made us uncomfortable with the quality of construction and we moved on. I had saved searches set up in Black Pearl, Leonidas, Uptown (mostly Freret, Milan and Riverside), Mid City, Irish Channel, and Park Timbers and Old Aurora on the Westbank. I saved those six months ago. Do you know what neighborhood wasn’t on that list? Bywater. And next month we’ll be moving into our new home which happens to be located in…….? The Bywater.

It’s not that we excluded Bywater; we just never considered it for no logical reason whatsoever. Earlier in our process, we had off-street parking pretty high on our list of priorities. There’s not much of that in the Bywater (or Irish Channel, for that matter), so we weren’t paying much attention to that part of the map. I was getting frustrated with how little was hitting the market in our target neighborhoods, so my eyes started wandering downriver.

Mindy and I saw a few Bywater listings that looked promising, so we added them to our list of homes to see when we were in town last week. Even then, they didn’t make the Day 1 cut. On Day 2, we saw some homes in the neighborhood, walked around, went to the Farmer’s Market, crossed the Rusty Rainbow Bridge into Crescent Park, attended a neuroscientist’s talk about ancient consciousness while enjoying a tiki cocktail at the Saturn Bar and we were hooked. The next day, we saw THE house, felt butterflies as soon as we walked in the door, and now we’re under contract.

That’s the way a house search usually goes — minus the tiki drinks/neuroscience combination — and that’s why I love it. Despite all of the information-gathering and preparation, you never know where you’re really gonna feel it. And that’s cool.