#44: Buy a house

#44: Buy a house (in progress)

Robert and I are in the midst of purchasing a house in that lovely process called a Short Sale.  Don't be fooled by the name, it is a very, very, very....very loooooong sale.  The seller officially accepted our bid on June 25th.  Ever since then we've been waiting on the seller's bank to do an appraisal that basically says that the amount of the offer is appropriate (a BPO--Broker Price Opinion).  A little over a week ago we finally got an update that the bank's paperwork is done...it just has to be approved.  So we should hopefully be hearing something soon.  Then we have to go through the loan process with the VA, they have to do an inspection, and we may have to fix a couple things in the house.  I really have no idea how long this is all going to take.  We're locked into a contract with this house for 120 days, which is the end of October.  But there's no guarantee that we'll have closed by then, the contract just means we can't put bids in on other houses until then.  The wait is excruciating!!  I spend so much time daydreaming of this house, how we're going to paint it, decorate it, all the things we can do there.

Isn't she adorable?

I literally cannot wait.  As soon as we drove away from the house the first time we looked at it, I was already imagining our housewarming party.  This was the second house we ever looked at.  I was immediately in love with it.  The interesting tri-level layout, the counter space in the kitchen, the large living room with two (count 'em, two) sliding door walls for letting the dog out (a doorwall in the living room for letting the dog out was one of my "must haves" in a house).

Look how cozy!!

Like I said, I was planning the housewarming party.  Robert was more apprehensive, he didn't want to buy the second house we saw, he thought we should look around at what's out there a bit more.  I figured, yeah, it might have only been the second house, but if it's everything that we want, why should that matter?  Then our realtor told us it was a short sale.  And we had decided we wanted to avoid short sales, specifically because we didn't want to deal with the hassle and all. the. waiting.

So, we looked at more houses.  There was one, built in the 30s with an addition, a 5-bedroom house with a giant yard.  Robert really liked it, wanted to put in a bid.  I was more apprehensive, as there was going to be a lot of work that needed to be done (and the yellowish/rust-ish upstairs wallpaper with the little covered wagons kind of made me want to pour acid on the walls), and that's all I could think of at first.  After thinking about it for a couple days, I started to picture us living there...where we could add more counter space, how I could store my mugs on the kitchen shelves that lined the ceilings, with 5 bedrooms, I could have a separate craft room and office, rather than the two-in-one I had been planning.  Also, the yard was largely un-landscaped, so I started planning where the vegetable garden would be, and I started to picture our wedding in that yard.  I could see us living there, and I started to get excited.  But it had been a few days by that point, and as Robert was getting ready to contact our realtor to put in a bid, he discovered there had already been a bid accepted.

Second heartbreak.

We saw some more houses, some houses that hadn't been updated since the 70s (helloooo yellow glass cabinets and shag carpet), and at least one house that we were pretty sure was a murder house.  Then we saw a house we liked.  It was a decent price in a nice location, about a block from a lake, right off the freeway.  One of the bathrooms had powder blue walls and tiles (yuck), but the master bathroom was suuuuper pink.  Pink walls, pink vanity chair, pink sinks, pink bathtub and shower (yeah, it had a shower and a bathtub in the same bathroom--both pink), and a pink toilet.  That I couldn't get over it.  The bathroom was definitely going to be the first thing to be remodeled.  Our realtor was out of town, so we met with her as soon as she got back in town the next night, we wanted to jump on it, we weren't going to loose another house we liked.  So we met with her, and she told us it was also a short sale. (Seriously, what's with listings not telling us that up front?)  We realized that for our budget (Which is not much, since I have little-to-no-income) we would either get a house in a not-so-nice neighborhood that would need a lot of work, or a decent house in a nice neighborhood on a short sale.  We decided we should just bite the bullet and do the short sale.  So we started going forward with writing up the offer for the pink toilet.  And then I said, "Hang on, if we're now willing to do a short sale, do we want this house, or the first one that we really liked?"  We decided to take the night to think it over and put in the bid the next day, but we had only driven about 5 minutes from the real estate office before we were both set on going for that original house.  As a bonus, in the time since we first looked at it, the sellers had dropped the price by $15,000!

I'm going to build a bookcase to cover

 the entire wall on the right!

And we've been waiting ever since.  I've already picked out paint samples.  We went on a errand to IKEA one day and ended up picking out what entertainment center we want, and brainstormed about what kind of furniture we want in the front room, and whether or not we should get barstools for the kitchen picture window.  Oh, and I can tell you, my mother's tile services have already been requested for the kitchen (She cuts her own tile!  How cool is that?).  I don't know if you can tell, but that tile on top of the cupboards is pink, with a white design in it.  Seriously.

I'll let y'all know when things move forward.  Keep yr fingers crossed for us!