After a few years of talking about it, M and I are on the verge of owning our first house.
We'd been browsing off and on in our neighborhood since March or so, going to the occasional open house. We like the area, and PG's daycare is in the neighborhood, so we figured it was a good place to look. But then came our visit to the mortgage lender in early August, and with it the cold hard truth that we can't afford the houses in our neighborhood.
In fact, given the estimated house price that fit our preferred monthly payment (that is, no higher than our current rent,) we really couldn't afford much of a house at all. Our realtor gave us copious listings, and we drove around and checked things out, but nothing really looked good to us. What I really didn't like was that most of them were on narrow streets with cars parked on both sides of the street, allowing only one car to pass at a time. A lot of the neighborhoods looked kinda shoddy too. I was getting pretty depressed, especially when I thought about moving my daughter into such a situation.
Eventually, M and I each found a house that looked reasonably encouraging from the listing and the drive-by, so we had our realtor get us in to see the inside. This was the Sunday of Labor Day weekend. It was to be a fateful day.
The townhouse I liked was near my old high school (nearby track to run on!) and was in a good elementary school district for PG. The road was another one of those narrow jobs, but it was one-way, so there would be no dealing with waiting your turn while oncoming traffic drove though. The chain-link fences bordering the front yards left something to be desired, but I decided I could live with that. The insides were OK, though PG discovered that the bedroom door doesn't close all the way easily (PG loves to open and close doors!) The thing that more or less killed the deal, however, was that a fairly busy road ran directly behind the backyard. We moved on to the next one.
The next one was M's favorite - a nice little Cape Cod that had a driveway, was near the end of a dead-end street, and was near a playground and a swim club. Again, the road was narrow. I wasn't thrilled with the general location either, but I gave the house a shot. We were turned off almost immediately by the amount of cosmetic improvements the house needed, however. Especially noteworthy was that the one and only bathroom was so small, and the hallway outside it so narrow, that a conventional door would not really open in either direction, and so it had one of those plastic accordion doors. Otherwise, it was a little run down, and we decided to pass.
At that point, our realtor had to go do an open house for a house she was selling, so we parted ways with her and got some lunch before checking out a few open houses I had found in the classifieds.
PG fell asleep before we reached the first open house, so M and I took turns looking at the house. M went in first and came back with a less-than-glowing review. I checked it out anyway. It was another townhouse built in the early 50's, like pretty much every all-brick townhouse in the metro area. The interesting thing was that it was being sold by the person who had bought it when it was built. They were asking a pretty low price and offering a $10,000 credit towards renovations. Considering that the house looked pretty much like it probably did in 1950 (especially the kitchen appliances,) that $10K would probably be used up very, very quickly. We moved on.
Due to lunch and getting caught up in conversation with the realtor at the $10K credit house, we ended up with very little time left to us before the open houses returned to being closed houses and could only see one more. Our realtor had given us the address to the open house she was doing, so we decided to check that out, even though it was a bit out of our price range and was in a ZIP in which we hadn't been looking.
This time, it was a duplex (or "semi-detached," as they call them these days - I call them "townhouses where everybody gets an end unit.") PG was still asleep in her car seat, so M went first again. After a while she came back out...
"It's perfect," said she.
So I went in and looked at it. The wall between the dining room and the kitchen had been taken out and replaced with a counter, opening up the area. The basement, partially finished, had a full bath conveniently located for a guest who might spend the night. The backyard was large. It was great. I went back to the car and said "I want to be able to afford this house."
We drove around the neighborhood (that day and on Labor Day) - it looked nice and the roads were wide. We looked up the local elementary school - one of the best in the county. We considered our finances and had our mortgage lady work out every possible loan and grant scenario to see what the lowest possible monthly payment might be. It was a bit high, but our accountant/M's friend advised that we should change our withholdings to get bigger paychecks, so that would make up most of the difference.
We went back to the house after work on the day after Labor Day to give it a really good look. On her way from work to the house, M got into a pretty bad car accident. She was fine, though pretty shaken up, and I was the one who had picked up PG from daycare and brought her to the house, so PG wasn't in M's car, as she usually would be. The guy who hit her had Progressive car insurance, and they took excellent care of the situation. It probably helped that it was a commercial vehicle and they had a nicer policy than John Q. Public would. I know there's a reader out there that might know if that made a difference.
Anyway, M's car was still drivable, albeit inaccessible from the passenger side, so after waiting for about 45 minutes for the police to come and tell her that there was no need for a report, M arrived at the house and finished up the tour with me. We loved the house even more the second time. This time we also thought to check out the attic, with its completely finished floor, a rarity among houses like that, in my experience. We even met the next door neighbors, who seemed nice and had a little baby. We even met the sellers of the house. PG played with their daughter and had a delightful time. Afterwards, M, PG and I went to dinner at a Subway in a nearby strip mall and liked the looks of the people hanging around there. We decided to make a formal offer.
Since every friend, relative and passing acquaintance with whom we had talked about house hunting had said that it's a buyer's market, we decided to start with an offer that was about $7,000 below list price. The sellers countered with... the list price. There was another bid that came in at the same time (less than an hour before ours.) Whatever they offered, it was better than ours, because they're the ones that have a contract on that house now.
But we wouldn't find out for a few days that we had lost Dream House. In the meantime, our realtor had e-mailed us some listings of comparable houses in the neighborhood, almost all of them listing for lower prices... some of them significantly so. M and I decided to look at those houses, though our agendas in doing so were different. M's agenda was to show me that a cheaper house is cheaper for a reason and would be unacceptable, therefore necessitating that we play ball with Dream House's sellers. My agenda was to show M that we could get a house that, if not as good, was at least good enough for a lower price.
We scheduled to see two houses, both within two or three blocks of Dream House. The first one was a good $25,000 less than Dream House. It had its charms (including, we would later find out, its location right next door to a daycare.) But overall, it was pretty lousy. The kitchen appliances had noticeable rust, as did the washer and dryer downstairs. The basement was falling apart. It looked like M had achieved her goal, and we secluded ourselves in one of the upstairs bedrooms to discuss the latest findings of our mortgage lady regarding the possibility of meeting the list price on Dream House. Of course, we still went and saw the other house.
This next house was $10,000 less than Dream House. Any thought of making another offer on Dream House ceased to exist after we looked at it. In the end, M's "evil plan" (her words) failed, and mine succeeded! Mua-ha-ha!!!
It had pretty much everything that Dream House had (except for the opened up kitchen and the full bath in the basement - only a half-bath there,) and had something Dream House did not have - a screened-in back porch that goes from one side of the duplex to the other (the next-door neighbor has claim to half of that, of course, and there's a screen separating the two halves.)
We put in an offer the very next day. Unlike the offer on Dream House, this wasn't a verbal offer to see how they would respond - we offered an actual contract. We didn't mess around this time and offered list price. Actually, we offered $100 above list, because we had gotten so used to rounding up to the next thousand that we rounded up in the offer without thinking (in fact, M wasn't even aware that the actual price was $100 less than what we had been saying to each other until after the fact.) So that translates to about $3.33 a year over 30 years, which, in turn, translates to about 28 cents a month. I think we can handle it.
The contract was signed by the seller a few hours later. We probably should have started lower. Oh well.
The inspection was done last week. It went very well. There were a few fixes that needed to be made, most of which were added to the contract and subsequently agreed upon by the seller. Otherwise, the inspector found the house to be quite satisfactory, and he was over the moon about the Pargo windows. It made me feel a lot better about the investment we are about to make. Though the water heater, while fine for the moment, is 16 years old, right around the age that water heaters call it quits. If it does, hopefully it will do so within the next year, while the homeowner's warranty that we had the seller agree to is still in effect. I do believe we'll be saving up for a new water heater so we'll be ready to buy one as soon as the warranty expires.
So that's where we are now. An appraisal comes next, possibly later this week. Assuming that goes well, we should be good to go from here on out. Settlement is October 27, and we plan to move in mid-November, after we've done some repainting in a few rooms!
Want to see the rest of the pictures I took of the house? Go ahead and check 'em out!
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