House Hunting Update
I’ve been kinda blogging apathetic here lately. No, I don’t have a fever! lol Losing my camera with all those great pictures that made for several great blog posts really threw me for a loop. House hunting and packing has also taken up a lot of my mental energy and time. The good news is I did buy a new camera. I returned my Kodak and bought a better one. And I’m not telling what it is! I like it and I don’t want to know if it’s crap this time or not! I haven’t taken good pictures with it yet, other than just to play around with it. I’m still sooo flipping dissapointed that I don’t have any of our 2009 Christmas pictures or some cute ones I took before that and during my parents visit. Anyway, I must move on and not dwell on that anymore.
So… for an update!!
We looked at 6 houses this past Saturday and I have two more scheduled to look at myself this coming week. One of the houses was the very first one that we liked that started this whole moving process. It’s also still the one we really like and the one we’ll most likely put an offer on. It’s in a great location and in a nice neighborhood. A neighborhood!!! If you don’t understand why that’s exciting to me, let me explain. Right now, I live on a main road. There’s a busy street in front of my house with lots of cars, honking and sirens going by constantly. We’ve gotten used to it for the most part. But we’ve had to be very safety cautious with bike riding and the girls playing outside. The street the house we like is on is quiet and has an acre of land. Part of it is “wooded” and Mike is having dreams of playing paint ball in the woods in our backyard. It’s also close to the highway which will cut Mike’s hour long commute to about 40 minutes. It’s a short sale which means the house is heading towards foreclosure but the seller and the bank is trying to get rid of it before that happens. The problem with short sales is that getting the house takes much longer, lots of tedious paper work and kind of a pain in the butt!! It can take anywhere from four to six months for everything to go through. And sometimes, even then, the buyer ends up walking away from the house. The seller can ask for a price that the bank ends up not accepting. The bank can take forever to approve your offer. So…we’re trying to not get our hopes up. A couple of the positive things about it though is:
a) We are not in a rush to get out of this house. Having to wait awhile will give us plenty of time to pack and get our house in order.
b) The seller is already asking a good price for the house and we will probably try to get an even better one. Many times you can get a good price on a nice house with short sales since the bank is just trying to get rid of the house without a complete loss.
c)Once the seller accepts an offer and the buyer starts the whole process no one else can put an offer on the house until the bank accepts,or doesn’t accept as the case may be, and the buyer decides whether to keep going or walk away.
However are continuing to look at other houses and not putting all our eggs in one basket.
I tried to copy some pictures from the listing but they won’t save! So, I have no pictures to show.
Basic stats: Dutch Gambrel style, 4 bedrooms and one bath upstairs, 1 bath, living room, formal dining room, eat in kitchen, office on first floor and basement with two more rooms in it. Unfortunately, no garage but we would look into building an attached garage to the side of the house. Especially if we could get a good price on it!
I’ll be updating more as we keep looking. Our house should be ready to put on the market within the next couple of weeks. We’re very positive about the selling of our house. We’ve put a lot of work into it and it has a lot to offer.
I apologize for how boring my blog has been lately. I’ll have some more “fun” stuff in the near future.
Have a great day!
