Hey there,
Boy has it been an exciting past couple of months! My husband and I are getting a house (we close on it next week actually :D). I must say, it is a crazy, but fun, experience. Looking at all the different houses was a lot of fun, though the market moves fast here so we'd find a house we really liked and within the next day it would be gone. Some places we never saw because they were taken off the market as we were driving to the house to view it! The crazy stressful part comes with the bank and figuring out all the financial stuff. I'm pretty sure we've killed at least one tree with all the paperwork we've signed. One day alone we signed like 60 pages of documentation. Now that just seems unnecessary if you ask me.
When we first decided to start looking at houses we really hadn't much of a clue what to look for either. We didn't really know what we wanted beyond a finished basement and a fireplace if possible. We quickly started to figure out what we liked though as we saw houses in our budget. I swear we saw close to twenty places by the time we found our house, probably more honestly. Aside from seeing houses with our realtors we also went to several open houses because the market moved so fast here.
At times it was hard to figure out why some houses cost what they did on both ends of the spectrum. Some seemed to be priced way more than they should while others seemed under-priced. The under-priced ones made us wonder if there was some reason why the house was so cheap. The houses that seemed over-priced were most likely so because the seller couldn't afford to sell for any less (at least that was probably true for some cases). We got to the point of knowing what we wanted that several houses we threw out of the running by just the pictures posted online. Other houses we didn't even have to see the whole place to decide it was a no.
All the other things that go along with buying a house, like the inspection and appraisal, were added steps along the way that had our realtors not given us a time sheet for when things had to be done by we probably would've been late with! It's also crazy the amount of financial information the bank needs from you too before approving to give the mortgage, like all of my student loans, for example. Since I'm still in school I figured it wouldn't be something counted against us since I don't need to start paying for any of them yet. One of the banks wouldn't give us a mortgage because of it though, because for them it didn't matter that the loans are in deferment, which was a headache in and of itself. But we eventually found one that didn't count them against us. Yay!
Now we get to start the fun-times of going through things to figure out what goes to Goodwill and what comes with us to our new place. We've just starting packing and I'm already not wanting to get rid of a lot of it. Oops. Ah well. I might find more things to part with as my motivation for packing decreases. We'll see!
Well, thanks for stopping by :)
Melissa
