House House House

Monday, May 13th, 2002 | LiveJournal Archives

I’m almost positive that no one on the planet, let alone on the internet reads this journal, but to hell with it, i’m still updating it anyway. Maybe someday I’ll appreciate my own updates.

We’re buying a house! This has actually been going on for some time but I’vejust never taken the time to write about it.

We had originally planned to wait until I had paid off my Credit cards but then decided that the market was good and our credit was excellent. Oh, and the bedroom of our rental house flooded one too many times. heh. So we got the number for a mortgage counselor from a friend of ours (who were in the process of buying at that time as well). We called her up and she said we looked like perfect first time buyers. Of course we started looking at the internet for houses immediately, even before we were pre-approved. We started in the $75-120 range on www.realtor.com. We found a lot of really nice looking houses but the more we looked, the more our list of needs was refined.

We wanted 3+ bedroms (our current rental has 3 and we feel crowded with just the two of us and yes we do intend to have children sometime; at least within the next 30 years), 2+ baths (we wanted a master bath, a guest bath, and we were looking to convert a bathroom into a darkroom), a large living space (or even two living spaces, one for more formal gathering, the other for watching TV and playing games), A decent sized spacious kitchen with a breakfast nook (I love breakfast nooks), a formal dining room (no that we intend to dine formally anytime soon, but like children, I’m sure the need will come up within the next 30 years), and a two car garage (it’s high time my car got the same repect heather’s gets and can stay out of the rain and hail). All this and we wanted mature trees and an older house (70’s to 80’s construction). It didnt’ seem like much until we started really refining our searches.

So we had a bunch of houses in mind when we went to the mortgage counselor to see what we could actually afford. The visit was as painless and encouraging as it could possibly be. We were told that we had not only perfect credit, but actually beautiful credit. We qualified not only for the maximum ammount available on an FHA loan, but also were able to claim Partners in Charity so we walked away (after many many signatures) with a really good feeling and the desire to look at houses. We also felt confident that we could raise our price options a little bit too. We started looking in the $120-140’s. We drove around town and found the neighborhoods we wanted to live in and started scouting actual houses. It was at that time we decided we needed a buyers’ agent and we went with the one suggested to us by our mortgage counselor. So now we had an agent, and she was Russian! She had a great accent and came highly recommended. From that point on, the process took off and became about as simple as we could imagine. She took our list of wants and needs and started digging up houses. Most of which, sadly, did not really fit our tastes. When we finally had a chance to tour some houses, we were only able to see 2 of the 11 houses she had found for us. Fortunately one of those two was on the top of our list based on driving by and reading all its qualities on paper. When we walked into it, we knew it was our house! So then Negotiations began.

In fact they began 30 minutes after we walked in the door. Our agent knew by our reactions that this was our house and started calling the selling agent to start all the negotions moving. We offered list price which isn’t standard, but we were asking the sellers to pay about $11,000 in aditional fees and donations for us, so we gave them the benefit of the doubt and offered them their base list price. It took three excrutiatingly long days to hear back from the sellers. They wanted wanted $2000 more than we had set as our personal maximum so we nogatiated for a couple more days and ended up at just over our personal maximum, but by that point, we just wanted the house so bad that the difference was relatively insignificant.

So we signed the contract with the final sale price and started moving along our buyers timeline. We were able to be present for the inspection and the inspector, who did a fantastic job and was very thorough, said our house looked excellent for 37 years old and was in possibly the best possible condition for a house built in 1965. He only had some minor concerns, most of which have since been offered up to be repaired before we move in. So now we’re sitting tight waiting for the 31st of May when we can finally move in and start making this amazing house our home.

It’s an intense process, but it’s all been worth it. I can honestly say that a lot of it has really been possible because of the people who have been working for us. They’ve all ben incredible and have gone above and beyond our expectations to get us into this house. I can’t imagine that any of you will ever read this, but if you happen to stumble across this, thank you for everything you’ve done for us!

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