WE BOUGHT A HOUSE! I am kicking myself right now for not making this blog post the day of. Between the excitement of buying our house, life with two toddlers, holiday season, work deadlines and just life, I have not had a chance to just stop, smell the roses and write. So that’s what I’ve decided to do today. Let’s begin…
On Monday November 13, 2023 Sheldon and I closed on our first home together! This also happened to be exactly one week before his birthday. The process: kind of insane filled with so many highs and so many lows but here we are. Beyond thrilled to officially be homeowners!
One of my goals, my biggest goal, for us in 2023 was to buy a home. I had no idea how it would happen or how it would go but we knew in our heart of hearts that it’s time for our family to put down our own roots. We renewed our lease for the house we were renting for 2023 and figured we would start looking by the middle of the year. The first step, getting a pre-approval to get the ball rolling. In this market, realtors won’t take you serious unless you have a pre-approval. This also helps you know the price of homes that you can afford to be looking at. Example: if you are only pre-approved for a $200,000 home, no point looking at $400,000 homes. Lucky for us, Sheldon was our realtor!
The pre-approval process started the middle of August. FYI for any future home buyers, pre-approvals are only good for 90 days. If you don’t find a home within that timeframe then you will have to get another, updated pre-approval. And yes, your pre-approval amount may change (better or worse) based on your credit score at that moment.
To not make this post a complete dissertation, in the end we looked at 33 houses in 3 months. The 4th house we saw we really, really liked and we put in an offer at asking. Nowadays you have to offer at least at asking price if you want to be taken seriously by the seller and their agent. The housing market is still pretty competitive for buyers but nowhere near how it was in 2020. We were excited to put in our first offer and obviously nervous as well. Could the process be this easy? Would it happen this quick? Long story short the answer was no haha. The sellers agent for that home asked us to put in our best and final offer which we did and then we didn’t hear anything. Come to find out that house sold almost $30,000 OVER asking price!
We looked at 17 more houses…SEVENTEEN and our house was the 18th house. We loved it. It wasn’t perfect but it checked off the majority of boxes that we were looking for. When you find a house like that, you go with it. To make it even better, the price. But this wouldn’t be a great story without some drama right? We actually had another house showing right after seeing our house so we went to that one. It was a little over our budget, had a fantastic yard BUT didn’t have enough bedrooms. It was listed as a 3 bedroom house but they counted one of the rooms in the basement as a bedroom, so really there were only two bedrooms on the main level…deal breaker for us.
We talked it over on the car ride as we were heading to a friends party and decided to go to our old house first so that Sheldon could put in an offer for us. It was the weekend so we had to wait until Monday. Monday comes, we put in our offer at asking. There are some talks back and forth and it “seems” like they are going to accept our offer. This process has taught me to unfortunately not get your hopes up because there are so many moving parts and things happen. Nothing is guaranteed pretty much until you get to closing and have keys in your hand.
Anyway, in my mind I’m like there really is no reason for the seller to not accept our offer. Well they didn’t because they wanted us to waive inspections. That was a hard ‘no’ for us. To make another long story short, back in 2020 during the pandemic it was kind of “normal” for people to buy houses and waive inspections. The problem with that is that there could be major issues wrong with the home and you don’t find out until you have to deal with it. We had to walk away from the deal. When I tell y’all my soul was crushed (first world problems) but I truly thought I would not recover. I was ready to give up.
In the back of my mind I held out hope for our house. Hoping that the seller would come to their senses and realize that this was a good deal but we needed inspections. Well, we looked at 9 more houses and then we got the call 2 weeks later. The seller wanted to know if our offer still stood. Yes of course but we need a house inspection and we were no longer giving them the asking price. They missed out on that chance. They agreed and we got the house under asking and with them agreeing to inspections! Now here is the tricky part of the home buying process. A sale agreement doesn’t mean the deal is done. Like I said before, there are lots of moving parts.
Most of the home buying process is all of the things happening in the background. Honestly the search is super so exciting but not the hardest part. It’s annoying and frustrating the longer the process is with seeing multiple houses. Things start to run together. The hardest part is getting your mortgage lender, making sure all of your ducks are in a row. Even when you think you have it all together they go over everything with a fine tooth comb.
All in all after starting our house search in the middle of August, we agreed to the sale on September 27 and we didn’t close until November 13 (it was supposed to be November 9 but things got held up – not on our end. That’s a story for another day.) I’ve heard so many stories about how long closing takes and I kid you not after this long and tedious process, our closing was a breeze! I planned on closing being up to 2 hours long because my realtor aka Sheldon said that’s how long he has seen things take before. We prepped by eating at Applebee’s and then went to the closing table. Haha, it only took 15 minutes! Record timing!
Taken right after closing. First pic in the house as the official owners! Also the kitchen looks SO different now! I hope y’all enjoyed this post today. There is so much more that I have to share and so many things that I probably forgot but we really couldn’t be happier. Now stay tuned for all of the house updates and such as I enter my homeowner era. If you have any questions for me, feel free to leave a comment below. I’m getting back to regular posting on the blog so get ready.
Thanks for reading!
