Open house weekend

The last couple of weeks have been a real whirlwind of emotion on the home buying front. Last weekend, we went to our first open houses! How fun it was. We made the big mistake of going to a few that were completely out of our price range, and of course fell in love with them. We met a few really nice realtors, and one in particular who we will not be working with. All in all, Saturday and Sunday were really excellent days.

The trouble came Monday when Pat called a mortgage specialist referred to us by one of the agents we had met. They broke some numbers down for us, and we realized that with a mortgage payment, PMI, taxes, and insurance, we don't really want to look at a house that is more than about $205,000. We've been "pre-qualified" for about $300k (haven't done a pre-approval yet), and that dream house we went to see is $254,900. And of course, my initial reaction (because I am dramatic and overly emotional sometimes most of the time) was sadness, and distaste, and, "We shouldn't even be looking at a house, we'll never find anything we like, there is no point to move out of this apartment, I'm going to take a shower."

 Not even the lack of outside basement access is going

to get the builder to drop $50k on the dream house...

Warmed up and clean, I came out of the bathroom feeling ashamed and disappointed in myself. What do you mean, we can't find something we like? Our original budget for a house was about $150,000, and we fell in love with a few at that low price. The whole situation was humbling and put things in perspective for me. We're going to be okay.

The funny part is that about a month and a half ago, when our budget was still around $150k, we waited and waited to go see a house that looked great, but was over by $40 thousand. I finally took us to go see it one night, and it was taken off the market the next morning. Shoulda known then what we know now, because we'd be ALL over that place. Sigh, we'll just have to wait for another one like it to come up.

Ahhh, how we wish we had bought you, 

but there will be others!

Another few crossed off the list

As soon as Pat got home last night, we loaded up Nina (the Nav system) with the last few addresses we hadn't seen in our preferred town. These houses were all slightly outside of our comfort zone as far as price was concerned, but every one of them felt like it deserved a look. Plus, we drove past our number one, just because it was on the way :)

First was our standby house.

Calling it a standby house really isn't fair, because we love a lot of things about it. We don't, however, seem to love it enough to jump on it. If the price happens to drop, we may end up owning it. It's not that the price is too high on it, it's just that nothing is compelling us to march into the bank on this one.

Next on the list was a house we really thought we'd love, based on the pictures and the ad.

"This home is completely redone, nothing to do except come and relax
on your deck outside your master bedroom on the second level and view the Bay.
Enjoy the breath taking views - lighthouse, ships, bridges, and more."

We went to see this knowing we were willing to pay a little more to be on the water - a huge selling point when we need to sell in a few years. What the ad doesn't mention, though, is that there isn't actually any water access at the end of the road, just marsh, and that to put those great decks in, the other side of the house is thisclose from the neighbor's 8ft high fence. We DID love the house, but the location just wasn't for us.

A new home was our next stop. I hadn't brought my pen and paper with me, but we remembered the ad saying that if we acted fast, we could still choose our finishes. Perfect! We didn't expect that when we got there, it would only be a framed outline of a house. That didn't bother us, though, so we went in (probably illegally) to take a look around and try to imagine the rooms.

The raised ranch's upper floor seemed fine enough. Everything was on the smaller side, but we don't need a lot of room. No Walk in closets, but we knew we'd have plenty of storage downstairs. Cool.

We walked downstairs and were just turned off. Using a couple of the 2x6's (a good point of this house) as a handrail to help with the stairs really wasn't an option because there were a couple that were warped and not nailed down at the floor end. When we got into the lower story, there were a few spots in the plywood walling where we could see about an 1/8th of an inch of daylight. We got back in the car. Looking back at the house, we noticed that the stairway into the house (a large slab of concrete that looked good enough for my taste) was propped up by a couple of smaller chunks of concrete on the 4 corners. All we could think of was that there was nothing to keep the stairs from settling and sinking into the ground.

The first thing we admitted while driving away was that we know nothing about construction and house building. Maybe these "issues" are all normal, and they're just not seen once the drywall goes up. We just knew that we would always be wondering if our house was poorly made if we moved into this place. Onto the next.

Hmmm, to tell you the truth, I have no idea why the next one was vetoed on the spot, but it was. We continued on to our last destination of the evening:

And we actually kept it on our list. 1/4 isn't so bad. This home is lived in and looks really well maintained, even if it's completely outdated on the inside. There's nothing WRONG with this house. It's got a huge yard, and somebody takes pride in it. It's a little expensive for what it is, especially considering it has such bad decoration on the inside. It's going to take a little bit of money to update it. So, we are just going to keep following it and see what happens.

We finished right as it was starting to get dark - home for tacos :)

The Happiest Place On Earth

Never has a place made my heart flutter so much as Disney World Lowe's did last night!

Lovey and I spent the day yesterday driving around, looking at houses. We found a few (a lot) that we really didn't like. Luckily, we're both of the mindset that it's just as good to cross houses off the list as it is to add them.

When this:

hubpages.com

actually looks something like this:

efinancedirectory.com

over and over again, it's hard not to get discouraged. At the very least, it's tempting to call the listing realtor and ask if she's offering photography lessons - cuz she's obviously got mad skillz!

Anyway, I digress. More about the home search later. While we did find a couple of properties that we both Really Did Like in our price range (which, depending on who you talk to, could be anywhere as high as $144k or $530k...don't worry, we're looking closer to the former rather than the latter), we needed a little pick me up after a long day of driving in what felt like circles (thanks Nina Nav).

Did we go for a drink? No. Nor did we go to the pet store, that place always leaves me yearning for a dog, and Pat doesn't like having to disappoint (I actually think that he should be glad about the fact that while I might someday come home with a dog he didn't help pick out because I just couldn't bear the loneliness anymore, I will NEVER sabotage our birth control efforts! Seriously, he's a lucky guy).

Instead, we went to look at appliances. We went to Home Depot first, and man...I just wasn't impressed. Everything feels like it's more set up for a contractor than a consumer there. This isn't necessarily a bad thing. It even might be a good thing when we're ready to buy. For now, though, Lowe's gets my vote for a Friday afternoon ooh-and-ahh window shopping trip. (No, really, we looked at windows. Fake paned versus real paned was something I never considered, but apparently Rucks has.)

I think that Pat may have been a little bewildered. He never expected me to get so excited about flooring samples (I made a pact to not take any until we actually buy a place) or faucet finishes. Seriously, every time we turned into a new aisle, he'd have to grab my hand to keep me grounded because I was bouncing in all directions at once. Ahhh, life's good when you're as simple as I apparently am.

The good news for him, though? Next time I'm really cranky, he can just load me into the car, kicking and screaming, and drop me off at the nearest home improvement store for a good hour. No chance of Zelda resurfacing after that ;)