buying a house – Between the Lens

I never thought those words were ever going to be able to come out of my mouth. We have been looking and waiting for our finances to come aligned for years now, and now is truly the time!

We signed on with our realtor back in September of last year. We got pre-approved by the bank pretty easily and started our search. We probably looked at close 15 houses personally, but searched through hundreds of house postings all around the state. There was a time during this whole process where a house we wanted to look at sold within two days of being posted on the market. The house market has been suuuper hot here lately, especially since interest rates on loans are so low right now.

So houses were flying and we were getting exhausted looking. It took so much out of us going from house to house to house, planning what it would be like to live in it, getting our hopes up, and then not even being able to put in an offer. We were beginning to think we were never going to actually make a move on.

We were actually looking at a different house when we found out about the house that we are going to buy. Our realtor had told us another house just a few blocks away went up for sale that day. We got in to see it the very next day, and immediately decided to put in an offer. We knew the house was going to go fast, since it is 5 bedrooms, in a great location, well-priced, and just beautiful! It is an old home, but you can just tell that it has been taken good care of.

We knew another couple was going to look at the house the next day, so we put our offer in and asked for a response within two days.

The next day, someone else had put in an offer challenging ours.

We couldn’t see what their offer was, so we had no idea if we were higher or lower. We went ahead and upped our offer and asked for them to respond that night. They did! They accepted our offer and we could finally breathe!

We have the inspection next week and the appraisal after that. Hopefully we can have a smooth close and easy move sometime this summer!

Dylan and I got pre-approved on a house loan and we’ve started our house hunt.

There are a few reasons we started this process.

1. We are SICK OF PAYING RENT!!

Paying rent is literally paying the mortgage of someone else’s house PLUS lining their pockets with a few extra dollars every month. You don’t see any of that money going towards anything that benefits you besides being able to live in someone else’s home. We have a really nice home and I’m proud of where we live, but at the end of the day, that money is just GONE.

My uncle recently bought a house after renting the same house for nearly 12 years. We did the math and he paid about $70,000 in RENT and what does he have to show for it? He paid off an entire house FOR SOMEONE ELSE!

2. We wanna do whateeeverrr we want to our house

Perhaps the worst thing about renting is having little flexibility when it comes to making the house your own.

Of course you can decorate and fill it with your belongings, but you don’t get to choose the paint on the walls or put up fencing and things like that. I’ve never remodeled a home, but every house we’ve lived in, I’ve always tried to envision what it would look like if I could truly do whatever I wanted to it.

3. We want land!

The majority of our house searches have been for homes that have at least a little bit of acreage to them. We love the country feel and want to raise our kids on a property where we can raise chickens and have a big garden.

You won’t believe how hard something like that is to come by 👎🏻

So far we’ve looked at five different houses with no luck. We thought that maybe the last one we looked at was a contender, but after making a second visit out there today, we ruled it out. The house had pretty much everything we were looking for. A nice garage, more than three bedrooms, a basement, and a huge country backyard. The thing is… the entire neighborhood that it was in was TRASH. Literally! The two blocks surrounding the place were piled high and even collapsing with garbage! One house had old washing machines and probably 20-30 bags of trash just hanging out in the front yard. We honestly probably would have made an offer on it if everywhere you looked wasn’t complete garbage. It was frustrating to find a house that had almost everything we were looking for just to be located in a dump.

So the search continues…