I really meant to chart the last couple weeks a little better. I wanted to actually type up some of my house-buying thoughts and experiences, but that mental decompression happened while lying in bed. But as best as I can remember...
Last week on Friday, I visited 5 more homes with my realtor. The first was pretty nice at a reasonable price, but the second and third bedrooms were really small and awkwardly shaped. It felt like a home that I would definitely have to move out of at some point because it wasn't set up for a family. I called it a "young professional couple with no kids" home.
There were a couple run down homes, and then one more home that looked good. It was a two story home with a nice layout. It felt more like a "family" home. It was also down the street from a nice park and in a neighborhood where I saw a bunch of kids playing around during a drive-through.
The last house of the day was the *ONLY* house I visited that was a straight sale, not a foreclosure. It was another "family" feeling home. The bedrooms were good-sized, the kitchen was nice and open with plenty of shelf space (gas stove!), but most importantly it would be move-in ready with no further purchases. All of the foreclosures had issues with the appliances being removed by the previous owners (who were basically trying to get as much as they could out of the house). But since this one was a straight sale from occupants that seemed fairly responsible, this wasn't an issue at all.
After walking through the house for a little while, I got a sense that this might be a good choice. The price was good, the location was nice, and everything seemed to be in place. After chatting with the realtor for a while, I let him know that I was seriously thinking about making a move for that place, but I wanted to think about it for a little while.
On Saturday, I sent him an email to let him know that I wanted to go back, but with a camera to take some pictures, and to size it up a little bit more carefully. We were going to go in on Sunday, but the occupants said that they would be moving out that day and that the cleaners would be there on Monday. So instead, we waited until Wednesday to go back. I also had the realtor look up a few more houses, just to keep the ball rolling in case things didn't pan out.
Wednesday rolled around, and we visited two more homes besides the target home. Neither home was something that I would buy. One of them clearly had an unhappy foreclosure, as it was completely torn up. The previous owner even marked up the walls with how far behind under water the house was when they left. Then we went back to the target home. We walked through one more time (now that it was empty), and I gave it some careful thought. I had visited a dozen homes, and this was far above average and did not suffer from the defect of having to replace one or all of the major appliances at a price that seemed very reasonable. The realtor told me that there was another home nearby that sold for about the same price, but needed several thousand dollars extra to make it move-in ready (another foreclosure).
I sat in the living room by myself for a bit and just contemplated various things, then went out front and told the realtor to go ahead and make an offer.
From there, everything happened very fast (for reasons that I'll explain in a moment). This morning, I met with the realtor to sign papers to make the offer, we got a counter offer this afternoon, and I signed the deal just a couple hours ago. Tomorrow, I'm going to meet with the loan officer to submit all sorts of paperwork (W2s, bank statements, pay stubs), and that starts the appraisal/inspection phase of the story.
The owner of the home is a woman who lives in Florida. The occupants were the daughter of this woman and her husband (or boyfriend). Apparently, they have run into hard economic times, as their counter offer indicated that they have very little cash on hand to take to closing (they increased the sales price, but will pay more of my closing costs, which basically balance out in the end -- and since it's already at a good price, it's not something I'm going to get worked up over). They want to get it off their hands ASAP, and I think they were quite glad to have someone come in and pick it up so quickly after they left. They want to close before the end of the month to avoid paying another month's worth of interest on their loan, so this is all good for me because I know that they're not going to goof around.
So that's it. I'm not quite a home owner, but the ball is rolling down that hill.
And that's only half of what's been going on in the past couple weeks. But I'm a little bit tired right now, and I'll have to talk about the exciting church stuff that's going on whenever I get back to it.
