Our New House....
Well, DH and I put a contract in on purchasing our first house last week. We are VERY excited and we feel extremely lucky to have found this house when we did...here's the story on how it happened.
As soon as we got back from our HM DH and I got right to work with the house hunt thing. We called the mortgage people and updated all of our paperwork to make sure our pre-approval was still valid, and we contacted our real state agent and told her we were ready to start looking seriously at houses!!! DH and I were about as excited as you could be about this whole thing, and it held through the first 6 or 7 houses we looked at. Then we started to get a little discouraged. The housing market in the area we wanted to live was great (ton's of houses for sale!), but in our price range the houses were VERY old, and needed a significant amount of work! DH had these grand ideas of what his dream "movie room" would be like, and not one house we looked at was up to his par, mine either for that matter!
We finally looked at one house that was really nice! It was in a great neighborhood, it had been recently been updated. The house was built in 1900, but the previous owners had put in a few new windows and new flooring, and just remodeled the mast bedroom to add an attic loft area. DH and I went home and discussed it for hours and we decided to put in an offer about 19k less then the asking price. In our opinion the house was much too old to be asking what they were asking for it! They of course came back with a counter offer that was out of our price range, and this is where we had a tough decision to make. Did we want to counter their counter and live at the very end of our means, or keep looking at houses that were old and not what we had in mind at all?!?! We had put the original offer in on a Friday, and they countered on Saturday...we decided to sit on their offer for a day and think about it...Man, did we run into good luck with this decision....as we were thinking about it DH found one more house that he wanted us to look at before we made our decision. He said if we didn't like this one last house we would counter their counter, or we would put an offer on this new house. So, we called our agent and set up a viewing for Monday after I got done work.
Monday night before we saw the house I wasn't feeling very upbeat...You know, I just didn't want to get my hopes up about this house being "the one" because with every other house we had looked at I had been so excited and they all ended up being a huge let down! So DH and I drove the 3/4 of a mile to this house and we immediately looked at each other and raised our eyes. The outside had potential! Now, it needed some gardening (shrubs, flowers...new grass seed on the lawn) but these were all things we had already discussed that we wouldn't let sway our decision on a house! Our realtor let us in, and both of our jaws dropped!!!! The house was beautiful!!! The front door led into what I assume is a dining room...if you keep going strait there is a kitchen, and to the right is the living room. Like every house we had looked at before DH and I both go our separate ways...I am always interested in the kitchen and he is interested in the living room (for entertaining purposes).... It was very hard for us to contain our happiness...I kept turning to my agent and saying something like "and they want how much for the house?!?!". What we were looking at was a house previously owned by a "flipper". This gentleman (which we later found out was a general contractor) purchased the house 5 months prior to that day. He gutted it and completely re-modeled it! He put it all new drywall, new windows, new insulation, a new hot water heater...he re-supported the beams in the basement, and re wired the majority of the house. He updated the kitchen, adding recessed lighting and he also put wall-to-wall carpet throughout the entire house! BUT, my FAVORITE part has to be the MASTER bathroom!!!! He completely gutted it and put in a stall shower with stone tile floors and walls. Everything in that room is new (toilet, plumbing, sink, fixtures...EVERYTHING)! DH and I decided to put an offer on the house right there and there....and we found out the next evening that our offer was accepted! Last weekend we had the house inspected, and everything went well. There were a couple issues that needed to be taken care of, but nothing major...the big items (roof and basement) were ok, and according to our inspector the roof has about 15 years minimum of life left in it!
Our projected closing date is October 19th, but we're hoping to make it sooner so we can move before DH's school schedule gets too crazy! Now, here is a picture of the outside. Like I said above, it needs work...and one of the first things on our list is to purchase a privacy fence for the yard...but with that being said...here it is...
