House Talk

Despite my obvious lack of blogging skills, let me post this Part 4 of our House Buying adventure, since most of it has been written for a month…

Well, we got the house! And even though it went so fast, it felt like forever. We had so many things to print, sign, scan, email, and reprint, resign, re-email. Even down to the last few days the underwriters for our FHA loan were extremely nit-picky. Even though I'd already given them everything about our lives, they wanted a screenshot of our bank account showing where I deposited the money from selling stock shares for down payment, because apparently the receipt of counter deposit from the bank teller was not good enough. Also, apparently if you're married woman, you can't give permission for tax transcripts that were from a year before you were married unless you sign it with your maiden name…that just seems pointless to me and a waste of time printing out another copy and having April sign it with her maiden name.

Anyways, despite the monotony of signing all sorts of documents and getting the correct things to the mortgage originator it seemed we were on the home stretch….then the appraisal came in.  Though we were at an agreed sale price of $204,000, already 11,000 less than what the sellers previously bought it for, the appraisal came in way down at $194,000. This was kind of a shock and we really felt that the appraiser did not do the greatest job with it because he used two concrete slab cookie cutter homes as comps to this house which was a custom build.

Nevertheless, there was nothing we could do about it, the appraiser went back and remeasured the house and what not a second time and held firm at his original value of $194,000. Well this seemed like a good and bad thing. It was nerve wracking for April because of the uncertainty of whether the sellers would want to continue working with us or want to back out and try their luck again. But we knew also that it could end up working in our favor, reducing the cost of the house for us even further into the range we really wanted to pay to begin with. So we asked the sellers to accept it at the appraisal cost of $194,000 but that we would reduce the amount of closing costs that we were asking them to pay by $2,000. 

Well, fortunately for us, they knew they were in a bad market for selling their home, but they did not really have a choice since they were relocating because of a job. They accepted the final offer of $194,000 with $2,500 in closing costs. We were definitely excited to hear this. We closed on the house on Friday, February 25th and spent a week hurriedly packing up our town house and slowly moving loads to the new house each night.

The following weekend we had movers grab all the big furniture and left over boxes. With both set of parents coming up to help out, we knocked it out super quick…and it seemed by the end of the first day that we'd already been here a week! Now we have been here almost 4 weeks and we have been loving it. Look for some pictures and our thoughts about the house so far in an upcoming post!

Related articles

• Buying our First House! – Part I (thisorrthat.com)

• Buying our First House! – Part II (thisorrthat.com)

• Buying our First House! – Part III (thisorrthat.com)

To continue our story on buying our first house…April and I talked it over a good bit and slept on it, and the next evening submitted an offer to purchase the house. As I said before, the asking price on the house was $213,000. Our initial offer to buy was at $190,000 with the seller paying up to $5,000 in closing costs. We also threw in that we would like the refrigerator. Well, after a few counter-offers and counter-counter-offers, we reached an agreement about a week after we had visited the house!

The final agreement was $204,000 with the sellers paying $4,500 in closing costs. Now this $204,000 was definitely our stretching point. We had really been hoping to get it at $200,000 or under, but at the same time we knew this was a long way for them to drop it, considering they were already listing it for 2,000 under what they paid for it in 2008. Throughout the process I studiously crammed my brain with knowledge from Home Buying for Dummies book as well as tons of resources on the internet to make sure I knew what we were doing. I also tweaked our written monthly budget to account for owning a house and other expenses that came along with this decision.

We are definitely going to have to be pretty strict about where all of our money goes and try to stick as close to the budget plan as possible, but I have made sure to “spend” portions of our income into church tithe, building up our emergency fund (which is building up pretty decently), and putting money into savings for retirement via our 401k’s and my Sharebuilder IRA.

So, we had the home inspected and overall everything looked to be in great condition for its 16 years. There was a leak under the master shower that seems to maybe only happen if the shower head is angle just a certain way against the wall. The relocation company, Cartus, that we are dealing with has approved pretty much all of the repairs we asked for, even the small things….so that turned out really well for us. The only thing we are sorta bummed about is that the roof & heating/cooling are original (16 years old), so while the sellers are paying for the first year of home warranty, I’m thinking I’ll perhaps want to just budget to keep that renewed and think of it as insurance for issues that might arise.

So at this point we have done tons of signing and initialing all over the place for contract agreements, seller disclosures, request for repair, etc. Now we are just waiting around…the appraisal for mortgage should be done soon, our closing meeting will be at 4pm on February 25th. We really need to start packing up! We have lots of boxes stacked up but nothing has been put in them yet.

Keep you posted of any updates!

Related articles

• Buying our First House! – Part I (thisorrthat.com)
• Buying our First House! – Part II (thisorrthat.com)

Like I was saying before, April and Michelle came up with a bunch of duds at first and then shortly after, on a Sunday after church we both met with Michelle to see a handful of houses. Well oddly enough it was the very first house on the list that we fell in love with very quickly. It is 101 Adams Farm Road, Simpsonville, SC. The address is Simpsonville, but the house is really in Five Forks which is the community north of Simpsonville, closer to Greenville.

We went to several other houses that day, some were nice, but just a little too old and so did not have hardly any closet space…and we need storage space! One house we saw was a home that was on short sale….and it was HUGE! Almost felt like TOO much house, and it would’ve ended up being too much money for renovations of all the old-timey wood and appliances, not to mention having to deal with the bank and not knowing a timeline with short sales.

As we went home that night April already had her heart set on Adams Farm Road, and while I tried to be the skeptic and practical one from the very beginning, I really loved it too!

The house is 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths with a small bonus room above the garage, which could be considered another bedroom. It has a half 2nd story, with a vaulted ceiling great room.  It has a dining room, kitchen w/ breakfast nook, and a pantry/laundry room. But probably one of our favorite things about it is the awesome screened in porch that is build out of the sturdy composite decking that needs no maintenance, though the rest of the deck is regular wood.

The screened in porch has recessed ceiling with lights around the edges and a ceiling fan in the middle. The backyard is spacious and fenced in, with two garden planters in the back along with a huge christmas tree.

Needless to say we definitely fell in love with it. It was listed for $213,000 which was definitely a little above our budget.

We wanted to stick to as close to $200,000 or lower if possible. We knew we could probably get them to come down off of their asking price in this market and throwing in the fact that they were listing it for 2,000 less than they bought it in 2008…so they were already accepting the fact that they were losing money on it.

More to come in Part III……

So it’s kind of crazy that we’re getting our first house…It has all happened so fast, but has been very exciting. April and I have been renting a town home for a year and half, and overall it has been a nice place notwithstanding the crappy property manager and a crazy draft during winter. Our current extended lease was due to end this coming July 31st and so we had talked about starting to look around for a house around the end of March or in April.

Well, I guess we could say it happened “in April”…the wife, not the month. Once she got started looking around online she just had it in her mind that it needed to be done, as well as hearing from a friend’s realtor that their personal opinion would be that April would be a great time to buy, but that that time period would be flooded even more so with buyers, and that now would be a perfect time to purchase a house.

Well after looking at tons of homes online via ggaronline.com April began to scout out a few possibilities with Realtor Michelle Kilcoyne (Southern Home Real Estate) but kind of came up empty handed with some houses that were well pictured online but fell quite short in person.

More to follow….