house hunt

Saturday afternoon we set out to see 4 houses guided by a Realtor we hadn't met, but the first house we wanted to see happened to be listed under her so we just asked her to show us the others as well while we were at it.

The first stop was a short-sale that was either waiting on the bank to approve a buyers offer or had just been approved...I wasn't really clear on that. Either way it wasn't really available but the sellers let us browse as the rest in that area had similar if not identical layouts. Ben really like this house from what we saw of it online, unfortunately the layout wasn't what we were looking for. Also, ALL the bathrooms had carpet. Sorry if this is something you have in your house...but, ew!

The second was a slightly different variation on the first and also a short-sale but with no offers. We didn't really like it either. The fact that it looked like a frat house after finals wasn't helping. The sellers were obviously in between packing and cleaning, meaning that there were just shreds of junk here and there, wires hanging out of holes in the walls, and very very dirty shag carpet. I know that it could cleaned up easily but it was an even more closed off layout so we weren't all that impressed.

We fell in love with house number three. Even though we haven't met with the loan consultant yet, I have a feeling it'll be out of our price range. It had a very open layout with the master suite on the main floor and an open landing upstairs. It's also within walking distance of a great K-8 school.

Number 4 wasn't bad either. Across the street from the same school. A bit older than the others and about 300 less square feet. The whole thing was BLUE. Literally every room had some blue on the walls, the carpet in the entire house was smurf blue and the outside was blue with blue trim! Obviously we could look past colors since they are easily changed, but whoah!

Throughout our jaunt from home to home the Realtor didn't seem to take us seriously. She didn't really tell us much about any of the houses until we asked, and she actually had negative things to say about some of them...interesting coming from the realtor trying to sell the homes! Needless to say, we'll be looking for a different Realtor to work with when we look again.

It was so much fun to look at houses and talk about our likes and dislikes. We drove around the neighborhoods on our own after parting ways with the Realtor and jotted down some of the other house numbers with For Sale signs so we could look them up online later. There was an model house open at the edge of one neighborhood but the bebe bean had fallen asleep in the back and we didn't want to wake him.

After sleeping on it that night we both felt that house 3 wouldn't fit our lifestyles very well. I couldn't get the second story open landing out of my head. It's easy to climb up and would be a fatal fall to the living room floor below. Also, all the "kids" rooms were on the second floor and the master was on the first. While we swooned over the master suite with the dual shower heads and walk in closet through the bathroom, we'd be really far away from Malakai upstairs and I think we'd get too tired of running up and down them in the middle of the night.

Ben and I both grew up in single story or "ranch style" homes and I have a strong preference for a single story home for my small children. Perhaps if we are able to move up to another home some years down the road when the kids are older and more independent that a second story wouldn't be a problem at all. We'd still prefer for the master to be on the main level so we could grow old there.

So I've spent the rest of the weekend browsing homes online and saving them to my favorites on Zillow (an awesome website that I found via The Nest). Once we meet with the loan consultant at the end of the month we'll contact Realtors and start looking in person again.

Let me know if you have any tips to help us make the process go a little smoother. I'll keep ya'll posted on our new adventure!