the house hunt. // the journey and our last hurdle

Tuesday, July 14, 2015

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As some of you may know from a previous blog post and my recent pins, my main squeeze and I have been house hunting. I kid you not, this process has been an emotional roller-coaster.

In total, we've spent about four months aggressively stalking all real estate sites and meeting with our agent. If someone were to stumble upon our pre-"open house" planning sessions, they would think we're crazy. We have Zillow on my iPad, Redfin on his, the MLS listings up on our laptop, and then Windemere and Google Maps on other various screens.

During this journey, we ran into a bunch of obstacles. We realized the neighborhoods we wanted to live in... Welp, everyone else wanted to live there, too. We learned that photos on Zillow are really deceiving; i.e., we toured a house that I'm 100-percent convinced was built for gnomes. Three bedrooms, my butt mister... that house had barely a one bed, and splitting your attic does not mean two bedrooms. We also discovered that neighbors are important, especially normal ones because we definitely ran into some questionable folks near the houses we toured.

We put in our first offer.... didn't get it. That night, I cried. No, I actually balled my eyes out. I had fallen in love. The second offer, there were nine bids. I didn't even breathe or flinch when K told me we didn't get it. I was becoming numb to this cold, competitive market... didn't want to get our hopes high again. With the shutdown of our two offers, K and I got a little nervous. Both of us had invested so much time looking for our new home, and we knew from talking to our friends who were builders/investors, that the market was only going to get worst. Were we really going to get outbid every time?

But then about a week after our second offer fell through, we found this cute little gem of a house in a neighborhood we merely skimmed over... it was totally not on our radar, and the house was sorta of hidden away. Kellen forwarded me the listing, and we thought, "Well heck, why not? We've got nothing to lose." So K and I met up with our agent that day, and as soon as we walked through the front door, we just knew -- this is it! We fell in love.

Bonus, the house is ten times bigger and better than the previous two offers we put in. It is close to the city, but far enough where we can call it a semi-suburbia residence. That same day, we put in our offer... and then the waiting game began.

Over the past few weeks, we've been going through our inspections, a few rounds of negotiations that almost made me pull my hair out, and then dealt with a little drama, aka the seller was being a huge diva. Finally today, we're getting over our last hurdle -- the appraisal. I'm hoping the next time I'm updating you on our house hunt, it will be us squealing with the keys to our little bungalow of a home. [insert praying hands emoji]

Fingers crossed that we'll hear good news today!

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