My husband and I got married in November and now we're embarking on our next big journey: Home Ownership.
I've been house hunting via the interwebs (Zillow is my fave) for probably close to a year. This has given me a really good idea of how much house we can get for our money. News Flash: Not as much as I once thought. Of couse we wanted our first house to be big and beautiful, but we quickly came to realize that what we're looking for is a starter home. We originally planned to wait until closer to November, when our lease is up, to start seriously looking. But when a house we'd had our eyes on dropped about 5k dollars, we thought meh- doesn't hurt to look! So, we pulled a big house hunting no-no and went and looked at a house before we had a pre-approval (Gasp!). That house ended up being not so great. The 3rd bedroom was really a basement rec room and there was some termite damage we'd just prefer not to deal with. However, at that point we had talked everything through and convinced ourselves that there is no time like the present!
I've been house hunting via the interwebs (Zillow is my fave) for probably close to a year. This has given me a really good idea of how much house we can get for our money. News Flash: Not as much as I once thought. Of couse we wanted our first house to be big and beautiful, but we quickly came to realize that what we're looking for is a starter home. We originally planned to wait until closer to November, when our lease is up, to start seriously looking. But when a house we'd had our eyes on dropped about 5k dollars, we thought meh- doesn't hurt to look! So, we pulled a big house hunting no-no and went and looked at a house before we had a pre-approval (Gasp!). That house ended up being not so great. The 3rd bedroom was really a basement rec room and there was some termite damage we'd just prefer not to deal with. However, at that point we had talked everything through and convinced ourselves that there is no time like the present!
So, we got a pre-approval and a referral for a realtor, and went to look at 4 houses the following Saturday. The first 2 were duds. The first house was in a slightly sketchy neighborhood, backed up to some super shady apartments, had wood rot, tiny rooms, and just overall not what we were looking for. The backyard had like 8 trees in it though, which was interesting.
The second house clearly had some updates and was much bigger, but was missing door frames and doors and had a lot of unfinished work going on. It also had a weird enclosed back porch that looked like it had never been cleaned and might fall over with a light breeze. Also had a sketchy neighborhood and a terrible driveway.
The third house was pretty legit, much more what we were looking for. The back yard was a little awkward, but we could have worked with that. There were some steel reinforcements in the basement which were concerning, but again- something we felt we could possibly work with. This house still had that "starter home" feel to it though.
The last house we looked at was in a nice neighborhood and just what we were looking for. Fenced in back yard, good size kitchen, 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, unfinished basement with potential, 2 car garage, and no major issues. The only major downside was that the mechanicals were all original, from '84. However, the roof is only 6 years old, the house has vinyl siding, and new-ish windows. We knew this was the house for us! More on that later.
