Back on the Hunt

While yesterday was my "Wallow" day, today is my day to get over it and get back up and searching and being optimistic.  We just saw 4 houses tonight.  I think we were both surprised on what we found.

House 1:Cul-de-Sac house - this house is in a good neighborhood, in a town we were avoiding because our car was broken into in July and it just left a bad taste in our mouth.  But, the reality is, people say there are good areas in that town and it is centrally located to everything we want to be close to.  So, this house made the list.  It's a Rambler, 1 story with about 1800 sq ft.

Our Realtor met us at that house with her 6 year old daughter.  She was fun to have tag-along with us.  When we walked into the house, she said, "It's very plain".  It was. everything was white and the flooring was removed.  The kitchen needs to be completely remodeled. The garage was a fake garage/had been made into storage area.  In a nutshell, we liked it. The house was ready for us to put our stamp on it. The price is right too.  It would be a comfortable place to live.  The yard was great and very private.

House 2:Split Entry 1400 Square foot house - this house wasn't ever on our list.  It's in the same town as some of Mike's clients and it's best for professional reasons to stay out of the same areas.  We weren't super excited about the house but our Realtor had seen it and thought it would go for a price we would be comfortable paying. So, we went to see it.

My impressions:It's a run down neighborhood. Yes, it's on a cul-de-sac but the houses around it are all run down-ish too.  Then, when I compare the house with other split-entry homes that my friends have, it's like someone took the design and squished it so everything is smaller and more narrow.  The stairs were narrow... the kitchen was small...  the yard needed lots of work but was HUGE.  It had a rain barrow and a hot tub. I don't think we want any of those things.  The floors felt wonky - or uneven.  It just was not a comfortable house for us.  so, we walked away saying, "house #1 is the best".

House 3: This house is out of our price range. in fact, it's $20,000 more than our original budget.  We'd already offered $5,000 more on the last house that we lost.  But, it seemed like this house needs a lot of work. I was surprised that our Realtor let us go see it.  We drove out to the point and we were blown over by the location! it is 2 miles from a state park that is right on the sound.  It looks over the sound.  There are houses, trees and other things in the way but you can see the tops of the ships that are going through the sound.  I seriously, could love seeing that every day.  I really am drawn to water and I think a view like that would feed my soul each day.

We walk inside and it has a small living room with weird spray foam stuff along the edging/molding on the floor.  So, obviously it has some insulation issues.  The kitchen is original to it's 1954 original build date.  But after that, it has a large garage/laundry room.  It has a large family room with a wood fireplace.  It's technically listed as 1600 square feet but also has 900 of unfinished square footage. I'm not sure if that counts the garage or maybe the upstairs that used to be the attic? It's unclear to me what it is.

We liked the house. It needs a lot of sweat equity but it is odd that the house is even as low as it is. So what do we do? We were thinking we offer about $8000 less than the asking price but I truly am scared that with the weekend, we will face a multiple offers situation and lose out.  So what do we do??? How do we go over budget? What does that mean financially?  This house will stretch us beyond what we wanted to do.

Well, there is one more house to look at... let's see what that house is like...

House 4:The Rental house.  This house is a 1 story with basement.  The bank that bought it back invested some money into it. There is brand new carpet and paint on the walls.  It's a safe house. The upper level is 2 bedrooms 1 bath and nice.  Comfortable.  To get to the basement, you have to walk outside.  You also have to be under 6 foot tall!That floor is for short people!It's an odd layout but it had all new carpeting down there too.  The bathroom was old and you had to walk through it to get to a room that had an old stove and nothing else in it.  As we talked, we realized that this house would be a perfect rental. It's in our budget - below our budget.  We could rent out the basement and cut our payments into half... it would be great for us in the near future.

So now we are torn.  Do we choose house 1, 3 or 4?

1 - safe house but won't appreciate too quickly.
2 - that house isn't even an option for us
3 - loved this house.  Could we afford the higher cost?The reality is, the house should be selling for $50,000 more than it is listed for. That's encouraging because it means we could fix the house and just flip it if we wanted to.
4 - the conservative direction to go.

Well, we're not conservative people I guess.  The reality is, I looked at house #4 and realized it would be like apartment living for us.  It's only adding one bedroom to what we have at Mike's condo +a garage. The garage would end up being our storage room and we'd be living a "temporary" life.  We've done that for the first 10 months of our marriage. I don't want to do that for the next 2-3 years of our marriage. I need more roots than that.

So, house #4.  Now is the question of what to offer.

We yo-yo'd around but after talking to our friend and mortgage expert, we found out about a new program. It allows investors who put down cash for a house, to rehab a house and then secure a conventional 30 year fixed loan within 6 months of buying the house. This would be great because the cash offer we have is through a hard-money loan and the interest rate for us would fluctuate.

That allowed us to think that maybe we should just go in with the best offer possible - asking price.

So, I've emailed our Realtor and told her we're offering asking price + $8.00.

We can only hope and pray after that that we put in the best offer and get this house. This really is the highest we can go and we're making an investment in our future by buying this house. At the same time, I think we will love the house so much that we might never sell it.  We'd have to live there everyday and be able to sit out on the deck and watch the sunset over the Puget sound.  Yes, that sounds miserable to me...

Which house would you choose?

Depressed...

I'm completely depressed about this house hunting process. In theory I knew it would be an experience with ups and downs but it really has been hard to experience them.  Part of me sees it as an adventure and I have to pinch myself and remind myself that if there was one, really three, houses that we'd be interested in living in, then others will come up too.

Every day, a few times a day, I click on the house that we wanted and it is still listed as "pending."  The bank did move the price down even though they had accepted an offer. Unfortunately, it's over 10 days since the bank accepted the offer.

I know I have to have faith - so is faith 1)continuing to click on that one house and hoping the status changes 2) looking for other houses.

Today, I found another house and even emailed it as part of the list for the Realtor.  Now, 5 hours later, it is listed as PENDING.  I'm depressed again. That house was close to a lake that would be perfect for Charlie.  But alas, we lost out on that house now too.

How do we move faster when our Realtor didn't want to go look for houses until Mike and I could go together? Mike tells me that I can go on my own with Sarah, the Realtor but she would prefer we go together.

I'm sad. I don't want to lose out on a really good house.  Hopefully, another 2000+ square foot house comes up soon that is under-priced and we'll get to be the ones to swipe it out from everyone else.  PLEASE!!This is my plea and prayer.

Completely confused and agitated

I've tried all day to look for other house options.  There is the really cool under-priced estate sale house that popped up on Thursday.  Our Realtor called and found out there are currently 5 offers and one has an escalation clause of $160,000.  We can't even get close to the 160k so it's not worth us going to see the house.  We were maybe going to see some others but neither one excited me.  They would be closer to the kind of house we originally thought we would get - cheaper and temporary fixer for the next few years.  But I'm sad that we've lost out on that house we had the offer in for.

Well, i just went online to see "what new houses popped up today" and what do I find?  The house that rejected our offer yesterday, lowered the price 15,000 - which by the way is 6000 less than we offered!  HOW DOES THAT MAKE SENSE??????  I texted the Realtor right away and she'll make calls in the morning.  She is just as confused as I am.

I hope we can just resubmit our offer.   The question is, do we submit what we originally offered or submit lower than that?  Do you think it's a fluke and a mistake somehow?  I'm almost MAD that this is happening.  It's the Fannie Mae automated system and I'm disliking Fannie Mae more and more each day...

Pray for us that something great happens for us tomorrow and we can just make an offer and get this house once and for all.

Good night y'all.

No such luck

We were hoping that our understanding the midnight deadline would put us in the running but we got a forwarded email from our Realtor that the offer was rejected.  We were driving to Mike's sister's house for spaghetti dinner in honor of her birthday, Mike's and mine.  So sad!

I was in charge of the Main Course:

Spaghetti Sauce Crock-Pot Recipe
Brown in olive oil:

• onions
• Peppers
• garlic - added after the others are browned

add the meat

we used 1 pound of ground turkey and 1 pound of lean ground beef.

Cook entirely until no longer pink.

Add to the crock pot and then add:

Tomato Paste

Diced Tomatoes

Tomato Sauce (no additives like sugar)

Add Spices, worcestershire sauce, salt, basil, bay leaves, red chili flakes

Cook on low for 8 hours.

It was pretty good.  I added more cans of sauce and then salt and sugar at the end.

Sneaky little buggers...

Fannie may wants the new updated best offers by 12:28 AM Eastern time on March the 9th.  Well, that's in just a few hours but it is very confusing.  Who has an offer submission time end at that time.  I hope all the other offer-ers misread it.  Our Realtor is out of the office and will fax us something at 8 tonight and we'll have to sign it ASAP and send it to her since we are West-coast peeps.  Good times!  I hope the sneakiness helps us in our own favor.

Faxing...re-faxing...re-signing....best offer...

It's been a crazy couple days.  Due to circumstances beyond our control, our offer for the house we want did not get submitted until today.  Fannie Mae has a new electronic system for accepting offers.  The listing agent doesn't even know how many offers have been made.  We had to sign the first offer but the printer didn't work, then the faxing took several minutes per page and it still didn't go through clearly, then I scanned the document with the signatures and the images came in as 27 individual jpeg images... and they were upside down!  Can it get any more complicated?  And then, we find out we're in a multiple offer situation and they want our BEST offer by tonight.  On top of that, if we are the best offer, the bank can still come back and counter to us for a better offer.  And if we refuse, they can go to the next best offer and counter with them.  It's crazy and this is really a messed up world of home buying.

To top it all off...  a new house came on the market for the cheapest I've seen for a great house like that, in the area that it is.  It has beautiful views of the ocean and water...  It would be incredible to have that house.  It's a tudor style house built in the 1920s.  Mike drove by it today and said that a couple other groups of people were already at the house looking at it.  So, even if we did want to offer on that house, it sounds like we'd have to bid above what they are asking.

I called my mom to discuss whether we should up our offer and she said, "I don't know, I'm glad it's not up to me."  What we have to decide is our comfort level on losing the house.  If the house goes for more than what we're offering, will we be okay with that?

Mike called me in between therapy sessions and we upp'd our offer a bit and added 008 at the end of it.  Maybe it will bring us luck.  If not, well, we did the best we could to go for that house.  We really can't go higher than that.  We'll already have to borrow more than we planned and we still don't know how much it will cost to make the house in a live-able situation.

If every room has a 10x8 square cut out of it with wires hanging out, don't you think the previous disgruntled owners stole the copper wiring and possibly plumbing?  I'm thinking $20,000 to fix the house to live-in standards but I don't know if that is a naive number.  And if it is $20,000 - it will be really tight for us to come up with that money right away.  We might not live there for a bit or have to camp out until we can save money as we go to fix it.  Are we strapping ourselves with a bigger project than we can afford?  I don't think so.  Ultimately, this would be a great house for us to have. I can see us living there for 10 years+.  We don't have to but it would be a possibility...

Holdin my breath or on pins and needles

Either phrase describes how I am feeling right now. Yesterday, i was really relaxed about everything, prepared to wait and thinking c'est la vie ... But tha all changed last night when i thought, "better look and see if any new houses have popped up." so, i pulled out my ipad and started casually looking. I really wasnt expecting much to change from my searching 12 hours before... To my surprise the house from the previous weekend that we wanted is RELISTED! I freaked out and wanted to do something right away. I texted our Realtor. Then i called Mike (i am down in Portland for a few days). So now, I am waiting for Sarah to get back to us about the house. Is it possible to put multiple offers on a house? I Googled the question and some people say it isn't ethical but it is possible. Others say that all the rules have changed since the banks can take weeks and months to answer... I don't wan to lose our $1,000 earnest money.... Waiting to hear from the Realtor.... Holding my breath and trying to concentrate on work.... This is a hard waiting game!

UPDATE:  Our Realtor called and said, I have good news or bad news... depending how you look at it.  The house we had the offer in was rejected.  Oh PHEW!  That solves the ethical dilemma and we don't have to even debate about it.   So, now we can move forward with the offer on the relisted house.  I want to move fast on this and get our offer in!

Offer 1

Today we resubmitted our offer for the Mid century house. We originally submitted on Wednesday but the Realtor came back with the information that there were three offers and she wanted our best offer. They later sent a letter informing us all that this house requires cash and that it has a minimum of $10,000 worth of re-plumbing to be done. When we heard that, I automatically doubled that figure to to be hopefully on the safe side. Then, you have to factor in all new flooring in the house plus kitchen appliances... We are looking at $30,000 on top of the house cost just to make the house liveable. We decided to tke a gamble on this house and keep our offer where it was at. It seemed, based on The Realtors letter that at least one of the offers was not a cash offer - and who knows if the other party would like the idea of extensive plumbing costs - so to raise our offer, we might have ended up competing against ourselves. So, this is where we are at. What we understand is that banks respond on average in 3 days to two weeks. It is a waiting game.

Friends and prayers

On Wednesday, I got to meet up with my friend Molly. Molly is one of my favorite people in this world. She made my wedding dress - without a pattern and it was absolutely gorgeous. We got to eat lunch on the water in Tacoma at Katie Downs - http://www.katiedowns.com/. We both got the Reuben and it was so yummy. After lunch, I drove Molly by the MCM - Mid century house. After telling her about our house hunting advetures and plans, she said she would pray for us. And after she saw the house, she said she knew now what we were looking for and would pray for that. In the midst of he conversation, we talked about praying at God would answerour prayers at the right time and the right place. So, yes, e like the MCM house but we are openo whateve ouse we end p with. We are doing the research and working hard to ind the house,but really do not know if the MCM house is the one or if it will be another one. Today, i ook anoher friend, Sarah, onsee the house. No one was there so we were ale to walk around it. I walked away from the house, liking it more than i already did. The landscaping is better than i remembered in my head - it needs work but it actually is landscaped. So, we welcome prayers that the right house will come at he right time. Thank you in Advance!

Informed decisions... And the Cheap House

We learned today that the house we submitted the offer for on Wednesday is in a multiple offer situation and we need to resubmit our best offer. Well, at the same time, i found a brand new listingof a bank owned home that was listed $10,000 less than we offered. So just think of the cost savings! The house listing was a non-descript rambler, looked like he owners trashed it before they left, but oherwise would maybe make a good investment. So when i heard from the Realtor, i asked if she and i could run see that house before e made a decision. It turns out she would be in the area around three and I could meet her there. I arrived aout en minutes before her. As i drove in the neighborhood,it looked okay to me. There was a small lake with a fountain in the middle of it that helped the neighborhood feel. When i got to the cul-de sac, i recognized a house on the corner as one that is short selling but doesnt have pictures of the inside. Then i drove in and saw that 3 other houses are for sale on thatbsame circle. Good sign? I knew from my researh that the house next to he cheap house was a short sale and was pending for $20,000 more than this Cheap house was asking. I walked around the house and took pictures. Mike couldnt be theree because of work but i wanted himto see everything and help me make an informed decision if it ended up that we wanted to make is house an option. When Sarah arrived, we walkd inside and the house reaked of smoke or someting bad. It was reall small living spaces and the, it turned out the one car garage had been walled off and turned into a laundry room. The scary part aout that room was black mold spots were all over the walls and ceilings. The bedrooms were small. Walls and doors and windows were smashed. It was an all around bad Cheap House. It made the MCM house look like the right answer. But, we had until Monday at noon to resubmit the offer. As i drove away, i just felt itchy everywhere and really, i just wanted a shower...

Inheriting Art --- the left behind kind

I was searching houses online this morning and found the following picture of a den or family room.

What do you think? Does it have potential to be come a trend?

The look of a happy dog...

I have to share a picture from my brother-in-law.  This picture is of my dog Charlie.  We've been married for 9 months but because we live in a small 1 bedroom condo, Charlie has to live elsewhere until we can buy our upcycle house.  Charlie is currently at my brother-in-law Jared's house and is getting the love of 3 happy kids.  They just sent me this picture in a text and it makes me almost want to cry - I really love my dog and miss him.

If you have a dog or a pet you love, please hug 'em.  I'm completely jealous.