(This post was originally written on Saturday, June 16, 2012 – see the intro post for more details…)
Of all the things I didn’t plan on doing when I got out of bed this morning… 😉
The plan this morning was to go and look at a few houses, but there honestly wasn’t anything really spectacular on the list and if anything, I guess I was more expecting it to be a learning experience to help us get our priorities straight of what we actually wanted/needed in terms of square footage and so forth. Plus, half the houses were in a part of town that I don’t even like, so there was that, too!
And yet a few hours later, my wife and I found ourselves pouring through 21 pages of paperwork to the best of our abilities before submitting an offer to buy our very first house.
It’s a little exciting, and a little scary … ok, so actually a lot of both of those things … but I think we made the right decision. In total we looked at nine houses today. Some were at the upper edge of our price range, and some were at the very bottom. A lot of them needed a lot of work! But we discussed the pros and cons of each one as we drove to the next, and of the three that we would’ve considered buying, I’d like to think that we did our due diligence in considering not only our needs now, but also 10 years on down the road, in terms of space, building a family, finances, recreation, celebrating holidays, out of town guests … all of it, really!
Ironically enough, the house that we picked was the second to the last one that we were to look at today. The one prior to it, we had actually expected it to be our top choice, but it was going to be a quick mover because they already had several offers and wanted to make a decision that day, and we just weren’t in love with the place enough to make that quick of a decision. Another a few houses earlier hit a lot of our high points and had some nice opportunities for improvements on down the road, but it was significantly higher and we were having a hard time debating the deficiencies for the extra money.
This last one, though … it’s a foreclosure, so it’s probably priced a little lower than it actually should be. It doesn’t have as big of a backyard as we would like … barely anything at all, really … but it still has a pool and spa, which are things that we’ve both gotten really spoiled with over the last year! The space itself seems like it’s really well laid out – extra bedrooms are away from the master, and we’ve got separate spaces both for a living room and a family room. And there’s not scads of junk in the garage, so we should both be able to park our cars in there!!! 😯
It also happens to be in the very same community that we currently live in – just a different subdivision about 10 miles away, so we already know that we’re happy with the area.
Anyways, it took a little scrambling to get everything in order because we were absolutely not prepared to make this kind of decision today, but we’re hoping that it ends up paying off because as we were getting ready to leave, two other couples had pulled up to look at the same house. In fact, our agent had even remarked when we got there that he was surprised it was still available because apparently it had gone into contract about a month ago and fell through at the last minute.
It seems like a pretty good deal – at least from what we’ve seen and also lived in for the last year – so I suppose at this point we just have to wait and see what happens. Sara made a comment at one point when we were signing documents that it was kinda crazy to be looking at paperwork that said we could be closing on our very own house within the next 45 days!
We should know by Tuesday if the bank is accepting our offer, so I’ve got a feeing it’s going to be a long couple of days… 🙁