Home sweet home: A marathon, not a sprint

Well. It wasn't an easy road, but we are homeowners! We started this journey in January, when we settled in back in NC and looked at our finances. We didn't want to pay rent when we could be paying a mortgage, but there are a few things that had to fall into place first. We wanted to pay off some debt, and of course, no lender is interested in giving 100k+ to two people that just started two brand new jobs. So we called a lender to find out what kind of timeline we were looking at, crunched the numbers and made some decisions. Despite Jay's veteran status, we weren't going to be able to use the benefit of his VA loan and his job also posed some roadblocks, along with the status of my job (since I was initially hired as a temp and three interviews later I'm finally a full time permanent employee). So we weighed our options.

Then we got an apartment. Logically, since we needed a place to live and see how much it cost to be civilians (albeit renters). After a few months, we reevaluated our situation and then gave ourselves a goal to shoot for. I told Jay I wouldn't look at houses a day before August 1st. This of course didn't deter him from looking at them online, driving past them on his way to work, ruling out neighborhoods due to traffic and school district, and staying in touch with our realtor on a weekly basis. August 1st came around, and he had 2 houses for us to look at. Great! We actually really liked some parts of both houses, and it was a good way for us to start figuring out what we "really" wanted versus what we liked on paper.

The next weekend, we had 7 or 9 houses to look at. In the heat of the summer, with a pregnant wife, and most of the houses being unoccupied (and therefore not cooled by central air), I'm pretty sure Jay was crazy. But he was SO determined to find us a house so we looked. We fell in love with one, only to find it to be under contract. It had everything on our list, AND a laundry chute. A laundry chute! I was both discouraged at the idea of losing this perfect house, and empowered to find OUR perfect house and not let it get away next time! We looked at 7-11 houses a weekend, every weekend. We were exhausted. We saw beautiful ones that were out of our price range, one terribly scary house that any realtor should be ashamed to list; we saw perfect houses with no yard for Hayden and Oscar; we saw beautiful yards with not enough bedrooms. We saw huge living rooms but tiny kitchens, move-in ready houses that offered us no first-time buyer woes (and that turned us off). Then one weekend I prepared to ask Jay if we could just take this weekend off, and not look at any houses. Please. For the love of God. Just let me rest on a Sunday! He said no, but at least the list was short and clustered together. I sighed a big sigh, put on my big girl panties and got in the car.

As luck should have it, we found it! Of course we did, because I didn't want to go look at houses. It had the right amount of bedrooms and bathrooms, running room for Oscar and Hayden, great location, good price and struck that balance between it's ready to move in with carpet and paint, but needs enough work to make it our own. We looked at it on Sunday, and after realizing it had just gone back on the market on Thursday, decided to put in our offer on Monday. We were a little hesitant, and wanted to know why it went under contract and then fell through. Our realtor assured us she would investigate, and did remind us 1) some people weren't like us, and hadn't thoroughly checked out their finances BEFORE putting in an offer and 2) we'd have a whole round of inspections to find out if it was a money pit.

I would love to say "fast forward to two weeks and we were all set!" but of course, that was not the case. While we were blessed with a great realtor, lender and favorable funding, we were plagued by an AWFUL listing agent and the ever popular FHA/Fannie Mae debacle, as the house was a foreclosure. Great for the buyer's wallet, but terrible on our sanity! Here came the weeks upon weeks of phone calls, faxes, emails, meetings, doing and re-doing and re-re-doing paperwork with one setback after another. The worst part in all this? There's NOTHING you can do about the selling agent, other than finding another house. That is, until the house is YOURS and then said selling agent can be reported to the state Realtor's board for her ethics, inconsistency, and just plain TERRIBLENESS. Believe it. She wasn't registered with the BBB, she's her own boss so I couldn't call and complain to her boss, but I was not going to let it all slide. She was unprofessional and all around incorrect on most of the things she did, not to mention rude. I have thought about "liking" her terrible page on Facebook just to put her on blast, but I like the sneak attack of a state audit instead.

Despite her best efforts to the contrary, we closed on our house October 12th. Since she had also not sent the deed over to the attorney, that meant it couldn't be registered and we couldn't actually get the keys until Friday, Oct 14th after the deed was registered...but it was ours! We are officially homeowners, in debt for 30 years, and we couldn't be more excited about it :-)

Oh, you wanted a picture of the outside? No can do. Being a foreclosure, the previous owners took everything that wasn't bolted down...or in this case, WAS bolted down...including the shutters. So until Jay puts up my new shutters, ya gets nothin'. It's kind of like that time I saw a Looney Tunes cartoon and Porky Pig was rudely awakened from sleep, only to hop out of bed to put his jacket and bow tie on. When I realized he was sleeping naked, I was disturbed for YEARS. So you shall not see my house naked :-)