roller-coaster ride

Do you ever set off to write about something, or tell someone a story and as you begin you think to yourself "have I told them this already"? I do this ALL.THE.TIME! I'm pretty sure my mother hears me tell the same stories and updates about Malakai or our house hunt the most, sorry mom.

I also do this a lot when blogging. I find that my blog jumps around a lot from baby stuff, day to day, house hunt, etc and I'd have to go back through and read my posts on a topic to remember what I've already posted about. It gets more convoluted when I do a post that has a little bit of everything in it. I think I'll start keeping things separate. Partly for you, dear readers, but mostly for my own sanity.



So, do you ever set off to write about something, or tell someone a story....just kidding.

Aaaanyway, this post is supposed to be about our house hunt. It has been a crazy, ever changing event:

a roller-coaster ride.

We started at a weird spot, looking at homes with a random realtor, which I posted about here. We had barely looked online and hadn't met with a loan consultant. Silly us. It was a let down of an experience, which was okay because we had much to learn and we were aware of that.

A couple weeks later we had our financing meeting and reality set in. To be candid (because I believe in authenticity and in no way want to pretend I'm something I'm not) our price range was low...a lot lower than we thought. After figuring in estimated interest, tax, insurance and our teensy down payment of $10,000 we were looking at between $130-$140,000.

So we started looking for all our wants and "must haves" in that range. Must have a garage, and a yard, we want a large kitchen, at least 2 bathrooms and hopefully 3 bedrooms and most of all it had to be at least 1000 square feet because we cannot live in something as small as what we're renting now.

Silly us.

I got hooked up with an old connection from college who is now a realtor through facebook and we chatted back and forth about what we were looking for. She sent us automatic listings in our price range and most of them were creepy. We glanced at homes by the total square feet and ignored the little houses.

When we went out to see some homes we learned a lesson with the first house. In our  price range bigger is NOT better! If it's bigger and that cheap, there's something wrong with it and something big! Also, people can get away with a lot when advertising homes- look at the difference between the listing photo and the real thing...

Salmon and mint. That is how I would describe the current colors and it's the ENTIRE house. Like how they painted around the fridge where the fridge used to be? My favorite part is you can see in their photos that they just put 2010 on top of 2005...so sometime within this last 5 years oompa loompas exploded all over the walls. 

Not all of the houses were bad, but the ones we liked were manufactured. We considered them for less than a week before finding out that they are considered "high risk" property and the interest rate would make them unaffordable. Not to mention that we'd probably have a hard time selling it in the future as they appreciate on a much lower scale than "stick built" homes. 

Over this past week our realtor sent us a lovely house that we would have otherwise overlooked because of the size and we are going to see it tomorrow. We are also broadening our horizons and choosing to look at a few other small, but lovely houses that we found ourselves. 

So...next week my weekend wrap up will include the outcome of our next house outing. It must be said that we're trusting God and praying that He leads us to the right home at the right time and literally closes doors to homes that aren't right for us.