What a long strange trip it’s been…
Sometime last week, Wednesday sounds right, we found out about this little house “over the dam” as the locals call the little community of Hixon. We just drove up one evening, after work, and peeped through the dirty windows and walked about the property. Nice looking property with a grassy backyard and in need of a new roof.
Now, I’m not sure where all of this began. Because on Monday, we weren’t even thinking about getting a house until around January 2005, when our current lease expired. But somehow, we’re seriously wanting this one little house.
I think it was after visiting the house and eating dinner, where we started talking about what we would do to the house. Re-Roof, transform the basement into a proper office for the business, paint…..actually kinda amateurish thinking after the first glance. Because, as we later found out, the work that really needed to be done, pushed those “wants” back.
If you know me, the major things that happen in my life just…pop up. I could never really foresee visiting dozens of houses to find that “perfect” one. Sure, we could drive around and look through neighborhoods and subdivisions but in the back of our minds, we knew that somehow the right house for us, would fall in our laps unexpectedly.
This little house, has made us want to get our of our apartment. We didn’t plan for this, nor did we anticipate how excited we would be on the shear thought of living in *our* house by summer.
Oh? Did someone say money?
See that’s what we’re thinking now, “Where are we gonna get the money?” Luckily I have two connections on the money front, a client and a family member…both mortgage brokers. So we’re gonna go through and check out the work that needs to be physically done at the house before we check out the financial side. More of a precaution and also to see if that good price is really worth the sweat equity that the house will definitely need.
May 19th, 2004 at 5:05 am
This sounds like Nancy and I. We don’t want to move out of the city but the longer we live here the more we relish the thought of owning a place we can transform into our own.
When it comes time for us to buy (hopefully this year) we both would almost feel bad buying a “new” home and ripping out its nice fixtures to replace with our own. we’re practically hoping we come across a place with a good layout but that needs our love so we can make it our own. I hear you, man.
May 20th, 2004 at 5:05 am
Thanks for all of the encouragement…..here’s a quick little update
We’ve gone through the house and it was given a good bill of health for being a 50 year old home. It needs a lot of TLC and a couple of things, like AC, that will wind up being (hopefully) included in our final offer. After all of that, we talked to my uncle the mortgage broker and wound up with 90% financing. Our goal was 100%.
So we’re going through our credit scores now, since it’s almost at that “eligible for 100%” rating. Found some duplicate errors and unfortunately it will be 30 days before we’ll know if they’re off the credit report. So everything is up in the air.
We might not wind up with this house, but we’ll be at least pre-approved for the financing. We still want the place, but we’ve decided to just take our lumps if it sells before we can get the credit report adjusted. There are some nice old homes in our price range, so if this place slips by, we’ve at least learned about buying a house.
A couple of thoughts about the place…
It’s one of those places, that if we can pull this off, we’ve made a profit on day one. It’s being sold below the market value and with the work we’ll need to put into it, when we decide to purchase another home, this one will have made it’s self a good investment.
May 20th, 2004 at 11:05 am
Buying a house can be a very exciting venture. I think the time leading up to making your offer and having it accepted is possibly the most exciting times my wife and I have had in our marriage.
You may want to go ahead and at least get qualified for the mortgage you’ll need. It doesn’t cost anything and it’s better to have that part over with whenever you start negotiating with the owner. If the house turns out to be in need of more work than you are comfortable with then at least you know how much money you have to play with when looking for the next house.