In the middle of June, my wife and I were faced with a dilemma. The same dilemma we faced the year before. Do we renew our rental lease or do we take the giant leap and look for a house of our own? After considering the pros and cons, we made the decision to look for a house to buy. It has been quite the adventure. Not always in a good way, but an adventure nonetheless. While we knew going in that it would take a while, and that it was not going to be as nice and tidy as they show on the HGTV network, it might have been just a little bit more than we originally thought.
There were several steps along the way. The first big one was where we would be looking for a house. Currently, my wife works about an hour south of the Twin Cities. I work in the southern central part of the metro. We live closer to her work than we do mine, but that was just where we moved because that is where we could find a place to live that wasn't the shitty apartment we found when we first moved to Minnesota. We thought about staying in the city we are in now. It is small enough that it reminds us of our hometown, but still close enough to the metro that you can get there in half an hour. The problem is that everyone else is aware of this and the houses on the market are either too expensive or look like flop houses. So we expanded our search in the hopes of finding somewhere near the middle to make our commutes similar. We also took into account the fact that we both may not stay at our current jobs forever, more so her than me, that if either of us were looking for new employment, it would be closer to the metro, so to move a little bit further north made the most sense.
After we determined the general area of where we wanted to live, it was just a matter of finding a house. Not just any house, not even the house. Just one that would suit us. It also had to fit into our budget, our wants for the house, you know stuff like that. In the course of our house search, and after we made an offer on the one we are going to buy, we thought back to all the houses we saw. To put it into context, we were driving about thirty minutes each way to go look at these houses, so we wanted to see three or four at a time just to make it worth our while. Including the open houses we went to on weekends, we figured we saw between thirty to thirty five houses. When we first started looking, we had a decent idea of what type of house we wanted, but weren't sure what we were looking for if that makes any sense. We knew we wanted a house that pretty much move in ready but we wouldn't turn away from one that had small projects or anything like that. The more we saw, the better idea of what we were looking for. Some houses we wanted to see because we were going to be up there.
We found a house finally. We put in an offer a few days after seeing it and the hard part was waiting. It had just come on the market a few days before we saw it. With the sellers waiting a few days to accept or negotiate or offer we figured they were waiting to see if they got any other offers. Either they didn't or they thought our offer was good enough to deal with. We negotiated a few times on the price and they accepted our second offer. I figured negotiating the price was going to be the hardest part. After our offer was accepted, the house inspection came next and of course there were many thing that came up. We compiled a list of things that needed to be fixed. What our realtor told us was to ask for them to fix as much as possible, they'll come back with what they'll fix, and you compromise on the list. This was the most annoying part of the purchase, I thought. We finally came to an agreement on what they would fix and what we would eventually take on.
After we came to an agreement, it was just a waiting game. We had a closing date. We had a last walk through date selected. Our mortgage went to underwriting which was the worst part. It was the worst because we weren't really involved in it. We sent all our paperwork in and all the work was being done by people we hadn't ever met. It was all very distant. We'd get random emails from our mortgage person saying they needed a piece of paper from this or that. Or we'd need to send them something else. It was all repetitive and tedious. And downright annoying. They would need every single page, even if it was a line that just said one thing on it.
And finally, we were homeowners! The grand adventure was over. At least the first chapter was over and another was just beginning.
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