Thursday, January 11th, 2007

Let the House Hunting Begin

One of the things that Courtney and I like to do is load our family up in the car and go drive by houses that are for sale that we might be interested in. We are planning on moving this year if possible, so Courtney has her eye open just in case something really special comes along.

Such a house did catch our attention on paper a couple nights ago, and we drove by it last night to get a closer look. It took about five seconds before we had each mentally moved all of our stuff into the house - the only question left was when could we have our first porch party?

So today we decided to follow up on the property and see if the ‘powers that be’ (read this as either meaning ‘God’ or ‘The Banker Man’) wanted us to buy this house. The first thing I did was call the realtor we used when buying our current house. We picked her out of the phone book based solely on an ad that she ran saying that if you bought a house with her, you can use her moving truck for free. We took her up on the truck offer, which was awesome, but we ended up very happy with her as well.

She called the sellers to get us an appointment to see the house on Thursday. It’s for sale by owner, so who knows what to expect. I plan on taking my camera and snapping as many photos as humanly possible unless the owners object (if they are even there).

One thing I’ve learned from house hunting is that you have to look at things in layers. The first time you glance at a room, you spend a lot of time on the big things such as wall color, flooring, the general layout - those kinds of things. Then you look closer at things like the trim and the lights. Then you might look again and see things like outlets and a small crack in the wall where mice can easily come in from the cold to set up refuge inside your living room.

So what I usually do when I house hunt is take my camera, armed with a wide-angle lens and a flash and fire off a ton of shots, just until it seems like whoever is giving the tour starts to question my motives for seeing the house in the first place. I basically blind everybody in the neighborhood - kind of my own little ‘shock and awe’ method of buying a house.

After hearing back from our realtor, I called the bank and set up a meeting to see if they wanted to give us a bunch of money. I decided to start with the credit union that holds our auto loan and our primary checking account. It’s a small place that is usually very good to their customers, so it was a natural choice.

Long story short, they will approve us for a house that costs way more than we can actually afford. That’s about the best news I could have heard, because less than ten years ago I was in a big financial/debt/bad credit funk that stemmed from a series of unfortunate events that seemed to follow me around wherever I went and ultimately put me on some sort of national blacklist for bank accounts, meaning that nobody would give me the time of day (more info about this in an old blog).

So now I seem to be on the up-and-up with the banks, which I attribute to my clean-cut appearance and charming personality (come on, you know they have a check box for this on those forms).

Now it’s up to us to decide how much we are comfortable with paying each month and trying to find a house for that amount or less. The house we’re looking at is probably on the very upper end of that range, if not slightly above it. But we’re looking at the big picture and keep going back to the probability that the next house we buy will be our house for the next eighteen years. So we want a good one that is as little of a compromise as possible. And like most Americans, we’re willing to pay more than we can comfortably afford and will worry about the details later.

So I’ll let you know what we think about this house. It could be the one, or we could open the door and see mouse poops all over the floor. I think those mouse poops could get us a sweet deal though.

Comments have been turned off since I moved over to Humzoo.

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