Oh my word. How terrifying is this? WE ARE BUYING A HOUSE. A HOUSE. It's pretty much the biggest purchase of your life, right? I mean, at least until your rich enough to afford an even nicer house. But the first one is terrifying. Maybe all of them are terrifying. I don't know yet. But this first one certainly is.
There are so many things you don't know beforehand. So many things you don't know how to understand. There are abbreviations, and taxes, and expenses... things you never knew you didn't know. Words you are given long before you understand the meaning of.
Well now I'm in the throws of it. Sick of apartment life, my husband and I set out to find our dream home for our dream price. There are so many things I hate about house shopping. You always have to compromise somewhere. You find a two car garage, but it only has one bathroom. You find a beautiful big blue house on the corner, but the kitchen is still locked in the 50's. You find a perfect house in a terrible, scary neighborhood, or an almost perfect house in a perfect neighborhood 100,000 bucks out of your price range. You find a home-sweet-home for the perfect price an hour away from your husband's workplace.
Pretty soon every new construction begins to look the same, and things you thought you couldn't live with or without seem totally negotiable.
We loved our mortgage broker right off the bat. She was so communicative, positive, upbeat. So encouraging. She taught me a lot. I had no idea that everyone has THREE credit scores. Three of them. Why wasn't I taught that in high school? Every credit score commercial I have ever seen, there has only ever been one number sitting there on the screen. But no. You have three. And the one they usually go with is the one in the middle. And checking your credit score for a mortgage actually lowers it by 6 points. Every time. You can check it multiple times a month as long as it's for the same thing (such as a mortgage or getting a car). But every different month you check it, it drops. However, it's surprisingly easy to build your credit back up. It can be as simple as making your payments on time. That is something that I didn't know. When we first went to the mortgage broker, we didn't get approved. We knew we wouldn't. But she was able to give us a few simple steps to help our credit shoot up to where we needed it to be, and a few short months later, we got pre-approved. She threw around words like Fannie and Freddie... I nodded along like I knew what she was talking about, but I had to ask my mom what that meant later. They're the loan agents or whatever. They were probably people a long long time ago, but now their just labels for companies that turn a profit by lending you funds to make real life possible.
A few days after pre-approval, I was already fed up with every house on the market, scared that we'd never be able to afford something worth living in, and completely falling out of love with the idea of moving.
Our realtor was harder to like for me. On our first meeting I kind of let my husband run the show He pays attention to things like neighborhoods and directions... things like "North side of town". If someone asked you if you lived on the "North side of town" would you even know?? I would have no idea. I've never looked at my town on a map! So I let him say all the things that were important to him, and I felt so left out of the whole process. I was so discouraged, and I really didn't like her. I felt like she should have been more interested in my opinion, asked me more questions. But she didn't. So I left her out of the house finding process until I was truly ready to give up. And then she texted. I just said all of the things I'd been thinking and feeling and finally said what I was looking for. Within the afternoon, she had a house for us to look at. That was the moment I fell for her too. Hahaha! She was so upbeat and helpful. We liked that first house we looked at a lot. We were able to narrow down what we were looking for a lot by looking at that first house. The very next day she called us and told us she had found it: Our home.
That morning, Petal called me and told me not to leave the apartment because a man had attempted to kill his girlfriend the night before in our apartment complex. That he was on the lamb and was last seen with a knife. Needless to say, by the time we drove to the house that evening, I was ready to fall in love with it. But it went above and beyond my expectations. I loved everything about it. And where we live, the market is hot. Very competetive. She told us to jump and we did. It was so scary. But we made an offer at 6:30 that evening and by 8:50 the next morning we were under contract.
Buyer's remorse set in this afternoon. It's not that it's not home. And it's not that I want to back out or give up on this process. But there are things that you overlook when you've just found home. And when you get a moment to think about living with two sets of stairs to get into your front door every day... when you have a moment to think about buying paint and a washer and dryer and putting in a fence, it gets a little stressful and you start to second guess going 15,000 dollars over budget.
Since my husband is in the military, we're getting VA loan, which is really really nice. No down payment, if interest rates drop, you can go in any time and resign the paperwork to get a better deal. Realtors and brokers waive their fees as a thank you for the service. Most of the time, they can get the sellers to pay for closing costs and things like that. But it's not all roses. It's a lot better than it could be. But it's certainly not perfect. We are not one of the lucky ones, and the closing costs will be on us. We have to pay for the loan appraisal and a home inspection and a radon test and a sewer scope and "good faith" money. It's all incredibly expensive and stressful.
But we get good news, that the house has passed inspection with very little negatives. The radon test passed with flying colors. It's happiness in the household. This afternoon we got the results of the sewer scope. It's an hundred dollar optional test that we thought good and hard about opting out of. Thank GOD we didn't. That 100 dollar test saved us 4,000!! Because we caught the horror show that they called a sewer system before the house closed, the current owners are liable to fix it. Yay! Take all the options, people. DO NOT OPT OUT OF THE TESTS!!
I'm still scared, and excited, and nervous, and so very ready to move. Oh. Yeah. They caught the man who tried to kill his girlfriend in our apartment complex was caught hundreds of miles away in the capital. Still. Terrifying. And last night our kitchen sink took a dive and is now sitting in the cabinet that used to be beneath it. So the stress never ends, and the house looks better than ever.
