Adventures in Home Buying Part III

{{I started typing this up forever ago and then we moved so I was swamped.  Sorry!}}

Okay, we're back now and ready to go find a house.  Our realtor set us up on his company's website where we had access to all MLS listings.  I did a lot of online looking and probably reviewed a couple hundred houses.  I was able to mark the ones I liked so we could go look at them. 
We looked at houses over two weekends.  The first weekend we looked at 9 or 10 in the area I really wanted to buy in.  Of those, we kept two on the list of places we would consider.  I will be honest, I was pretty disappointed.  This first set was in the area I wanted but not really the house that I wanted.  The next weekend, we looked at probably 16-18 places in the other area we were considering.  It was right after it was in the news that interest rates were going back up, so some of the places that were available on Thursday when I sent the realtor the list of places we wanted to see already had offers on them when we looked on Saturday.  The second set were the house I wanted but my second choice of area.

How did we pick the house we ended up buying out of all the others?  To be honest, it was the first (and only) house that I got excited about.  It was the only house we looked at that I could really picture us living in and being happy in.  There were other houses that I thought would be fine and other houses that I thought we could live in after 50 projects were done, but this one just gave me that "this could be our new home" feeling.  That's a lot of help, right?  The funny thing is that I think a lot of people make big decisions this way. 

We looked at a few more houses that day after we saw the one we really liked.  We also went to a couple of open houses with my parents the next day but by the end of the weekend we were ready to pull the trigger.

Putting in our offer was quite the experience, so bear with me.  We set up a meeting with our realtor for Monday after work to do the offer paperwork.  Mid-morning, Alex sent me a text saying his buddy had asked him to play softball that night.  I told Alex that if he could get our meeting moved to make it all work, go for it.  The meeting got moved up and we both left work early to be there.  We talked to the realtor about what we wanted to spend on the house and he suggested offering an initial amount that was lower than I thought we would offer, but since he knew what he was doing and we did not, we went with it.  He gave the sellers a deadline of like 10:00 p.m. that night to respond.

Alex ended up having to leave early to get to his game on time.  He was walking out the door when I got home and since we couldn't take the dog to the fields, I stayed home.  I was super nervous all night waiting to hear back. 

Around 8:30 or 9:00ish I think our realtor calls and says that the sellers got another offer at the same time as ours.  The other offer was higher but they wanted to give us a chance to counter.  And we needed to do it within the next half hour.  I call Alex and he doesn't answer so I text him and wait five minutes.  I call him again and he still does not answer.  I leave a message telling him to call me back ASAP.  I was pretty much freaking out because I knew that even if I did not want to, I would resent the heck out of him if we missed out on the house we both loved because he was playing softball. I also knew that even though the house would be in my name I couldn't pull the trigger without him saying okay.  Then I decided to just blow up his phone and called him over and over again until he answered.

25 minutes after I called him the first time, he finally called me back.  We agreed on a counter and let our realtor know who passed it onto the sellers.  A couple long hours later they accepted.  It was stressful.  My advise is that if you are putting an offer in on a house and you have another individual whose input you need, don't be in a different place from them while you are waiting on a response.  Its not a good idea.

Okay friends, one more post on the process then I will finally get around to posting pictures of the new house :)