Our House Buying Adventure

Our House Buying Adventure

Well, we had a very interesting week last week and early this week. My grandparents came out to see us from Colorado and in the midst of visiting we showed the house many times.

On Sunday morning, we received two offers. The realtor asked both parties to send us their best offer since we had two offers. We had decided to accept one if the other wasn’t better so we called my father-in-law, who is a realtor in Colorado, to see if we ran out to Colorado on Sunday, if we could see a house Sunday night that I had had my eye on that seemed "perfect". We had to see the house that night because early Monday morning my father-in-law was going in for hip replacement surgery and he wouldn’t be able to show us any other houses.

He said sure but he would need to call the realtor to see if we could get in to the house that night.

My grandparents were leaving Sunday morning to come back to Colorado so even though we didn’t have a confirmed contract and didn’t know if we could see the house we quickly started throwing things in their car and packing our car full of my plants and odds and ends that were fragile or hard to move.

We got the car packed and and headed out at 11 a.m. with one son going with us for the 8 1/2 hour drive to Colorado. Just as we were leaving town, my father-in-law called and said we could see the house but it had 3 contracts on it already that hadn’t been accepted yet. So we thought we could offer a little be more than asking price if we really liked it and still have a shot at it.

We heard back from our realtor and he told us we got a full price offer on our house with us paying $2,000 of the buyer’s closing costs so we accepted it. We even get to move the day after school ends!!

We drove all day and went straight to the house to look at it only to be horribly disappointed. It was in a great neighborhood but it was a mess and would need at least $30,000 worth of work that we just couldn’t afford. It was also not very functional for a family.

We were very discouraged and tired but trying to have faith. We had asked God if we were supposed to move to give us a full priced offer and He took care of that for us!

Monday we decided to get pre-approved for our loan and and to drive around looking at more houses, even if we couldn’t get in to see them. We went to the bank and discovered that we didn’t bring the right paperwork. Then we went driving around looking at houses that seemed to be possibilities and stopped at the hospital to see Mike’s dad.

We were very discouraged. We want a larger lot in the one quarter acre range (.25 acre) so that I can still have a garden but most of the lots around here are in the .10-.17 acre range and the houses we were looking at didn’t have enough bedrooms.

We started at 9:00 a.m and by 5:00 we were tired, discouraged and just plain didn’t know what we were going to do. The houses we saw were in bad neighborhoods or needed a lot of work or there was something else major that was wrong. We decided to stop by one last place and discovered a brand new housing area. We found that we could get a brand new site built house on .25 acre lot in a very quiet little town with the schools just 2 blocks away (and all for $20,000 less than we were looking at)!!!

So today we are going to check it out again and hopefully in the next day or two we will have decided on a house.

Thankfully, mom is babysitting 3 of the 4 kids so pray they don’t kill her!!

-Tawra