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House Hunting - How do you know?!
So DH & I started the house hunt a little before the wedding, but got serious once we got back from the honeymoon. Therefore, we've been looking for about a month. I guess I got a little hopeful because a woman at work recently found her new house within like 2 weeks, so I didn't realize how hard this would be.
I feel like we've seen so many houses that we COULD be happy in, but they're not exactly what we were looking for. In the beginning of the search our realtor told us not to settle, not to buy a house if we didn't love it. Now we've seen the majority of the houses that are on the market that fit our criteria, and the house we're currently in just had a buyer come look for the second time today so we're getting anxious.
More recently our realtor has been saying to keep in mind that we won't get a house that has everything we want since we don't have an unlimited budget. Now we're going through the list of all the houses that we thought we could be happy in that didn't totally do it for us and second-guessing ourselves. So my question is - to those of you that have bought a house, how did you know it was "the one"? Did you eventually just have to compare the houses that were on the market and decide which was the best? Do you recommend settling and making the best of the house we end up in?
I should mention that we are looking for our starter home that we ideally plan to move out of in 5-10 years, however I want it to be livable in case something unforeseen happens and we are stuck there. We also do not own the home we currently live in, it's my Grandma's and we're sort of renting it until it sells, she moved to an assisted living place.
Re: House Hunting - How do you know?!
It took us a year, almost to the day, to find the house we have now. It was really frustrating. We didn't have a lot of money we wanted to spend, and it seemed like all the houses we looked at were shiit. We were actually about to give up when we happened to look at this house. We overlooked it because it only had one bathroom. We had our realtor come over and we fell in love instantly!
I will say that you won't find the perfect house. You have to look past some stuff you can change (like ugly wallpaper and fixtures) and look at the overall house.
When you find THE house, you will know. Good luck! Oh, and having an awesome realtor is a huge help too. If you don't quite click with the one you have now, keep looking.
I agree that when you find THE house, you'll know. This might be a silly comparison, but it's like when you were shopping for your wedding dress. People said, "You'll just know when you find THE dress." The same was true for our house. When we looked at our house, we just knew it was THE house.
Think of 2-3 things that are "must haves" for your house. For H and I, we were not going to compromise that we wanted a large fenced in yard (because we have a dog), and we wanted dual sinks in the master bathroom. Of course we had other preferences, but those were the two things that we absolutely refused to do without. Deciding what is absolutely most important to you will help you not pick apart every little detail of a house, because no house is going to have every little thing that you want.
Good luck!!!
Honestly, if you are ok to wait and you have the patience to look at TONS of houses, it is possible to find the house with everything you want. We looked for about 6 months and we put a couple offers in. In the end, the place we found was absolutely perfect (checked all the boxes), but it was out of our price range. We just happened to get lucky and the old owners had to sell it in a rush and so we actually got it within our price range (just barely).
Anyways, all I can say is have patience....you will find the perfect house for you. We both just kinda knew ours was the one.....we were both super excited about it as soon as we got home.
June 2012 August Siggy Challenge: Favourite Pro Pic (I couldn't choose just one!)
it took H and I 4 years to find our house! we were on a really tight budget and when we first starting looking house prices and interest rates were high! Gosh, we must have looked at hundreds of houses. There was a point where I was almost settling just to get a house but that just had that feeling that it wasn't ours and my realtor always kept saying things to help guide me to not settleing. The biggest problem we had was the bedrooms being too small and I would say "well I guess we can put our dresser in another bedroom" and she said "if you do that, you've already out grown the house" and she was totally right! After a year of looking we decided to move back in with H's family to save the money we were paying on rent and utilites. This gave us a bigger down payment and as the years went on the housing market crashed and house prices came down and so did interest rates.
I actually found our house. It had been empty for a while and one day on the way to the gym it caught my eye. I did my research found out it was a foreclosure and my realtor got us in to look at it before it even came on the market! The house ended up being more than we could have ever imagined that we would end up with. We have owned it for just over 2 years now and have plenty of room to grow! and I was talking to my dad this morning and he said again that we got an amazing deal on our house! H will never let me sell it
HTH
***My Planning Bio***
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That's such a great story! We're trying our hardest not to settle but we want a house so bad!
We still live in an apartment, but we were house hunting between November and February. Here's our experience:
We went into it looking for a house that looked nice enough. However, there were a few things we *needed*. They were: a newer roof, newer windows, updated bathrooms, and in one of our top school districts. We also wanted an open floor plan and a newer furnace and hot water tank.
We looked at tons of houses, but many people put their money into cosmetics, not improving the expensive things. There was one house we seriously considered. We ended up not going with it because, while it was updated, it was cheaply done, and we thought it was overpriced. It was also on a hill and the driveway was really steep. It was just taken off the market a month ago at a price $20k lower than what it was when we were considering it. Definitely a sound choice there. Many other houses were split levels and just not open enough.
Finally, after many open houses and some builder open houses, we realized that we'd rather stay in our apartment, pay off my student loans, ad save up money to build a house twice as expensive as one we could afford then in two years. While I do long for the space of a house, I keep in mind that, in 2014, we'll be able to build and move into our forever home.
So, while my situation is different than yours, I suggest going in looking for key things that are updated that would be expensive to replace (the roof, windows, bathroom, appliances, etc). Most other things are cosmetic and cheap to update. But if you find a house without those things updated, you'll have to keep in mind that, when you go to sell it you'll want to update those things to sell it easier and for a higher price. I honestly don't think we'd have ever been able to walk into a home and fall in love with it immediately, because we are too analytical and needed to make sure the house had everything on our "must have" list before we would even consider it.
Sorry this got long, but I hope it helps! Looking for the right things will save you tons of money down the road!
Thank you so much everyone! There are definitely some things we know we want, like an updated kitchen & baths and newer windows. I almost feel like wanting both the kitchen & baths to be updated is being too picky though! It seems like we can't find a house that has both with decent sized bedrooms. We would really love a fenced in yard so we can get a dog, but I think we'd be able to get one built (my cousin does them).
Some houses have a lot of the things that are "wants" like a pool, full finished basement, etc, but they don't have things that we consider more essential, like newer windows & updated kitchen/baths. I'm thinking that we might expand our search to a town that we had previously deemed too far away (we actually are living there now).
It's hard knowing that we're probably going to want to move in 10 years, because it seems like why put all the money into fixing up certain things if we won't be there for the long haul? I don't have a problem with items like wallpaper or paint we don't like, but maybe I need to be a little more open to larger renovations like new kitchen cabinets.
Thanks everyone for all the advice! It's helpful to know we aren't the only ones that had this problem!
P.S. I don't think the wedding dress comparison is crazy - I actually think it all the time! I had the same problem there-worrying that I'd never get the "the one" feeling but I definitely did!
We looked at houses online for months and then actually looked and toured houses for about 4 months before picking ours. Though that seems like a short time, it really was 4 months of serious looking and seeing multiple houses a day (around 5 or so).
For us we picked the house that we loved the best. It felt the most homey to us and we were the most comfortable walking around it. That's how we knew and ended up getting it.
We would go on realty website and do searches, but once we started working with a realtor she put us in the MLS (multiple listing service I think) and now we have a list of every house listed with any agency that meets our criteria. Anytime a new house is listed we get an email within the hour, or if a house's price drops to put it in our range, etc. It's really great!
I used websites. Mostly realtor.com and zillow.com to find houses. Once we found some we liked and wanted to see, we got a realtor who put us on the list Michelle was talking about so we got the emails.