Steph's Stories: New house?

Wednesday, November 5, 2014

New house?

Saturday, April 26

We outgrew our current home several years ago and unfortunately the perfect time for us to move would have been around the time I was diagnosed with cancer so it just wasn't possible for us at that time. We love our neighborhood and have been pleased with the schools that our children go to, we just needed/wanted a bigger home. I have been looking on and off for about a year and we just weren't finding anything that really felt like it would fit our family. Probably one of our biggest obstacles with finding a new home was the kitchen area. With a family of 8, I was having a hard time finding a home with a big enough kitchen to fit our table and then with enough bedrooms for us. Another obstacle often was the basement. A lot of homes seemed to have enough square footage, but then the basement would have a bunch of small rooms with no big gathering areas for a family room. Another problem we ran in to often was tiny backyards. We don't need a huge one, but I wanted one that had enough room for the kids to play and room for at least a small garden area.

So I have been searching the MLS quite regularly and would go out with a realtor friend of ours whenever something came up that I was interested in. Occasionally I would take DH back to look at a home a second time but up to this point nothing had interested both of us. Then on Thursday night of this week a new home came on the market which looked like it might have some potential for our family. I contacted our realtor the next day and asked if she could set up a showing for it plus another 2 homes as well. We thought of waiting until Monday but I decided to have her set them up for Saturday and I would see if DH would come with me.

The appointments were set for the afternoon and I was able to convince DH to come with me. The first home we saw showed like a dream. Both of us walked through thinking, "Is this for real?" and "Do people really live here?" It was in fabulous condition and was absolutely spotless. Not only that but it had a huge kitchen/eating area and a huge great room off of the kitchen. Then we went down to the basement and the basement family room was huge with lots of light. Off of the family room were french doors going into an office - perfect for DH. It had 6 bedrooms plus the office downstairs and another small office area off of the laundry room on the main level. Then to top it off there was a good sized deck off of the kitchen and a backyard that was not huge but an okay size for our needs. (Unfortunately it was a rainy day so we weren't able to get a good look at the deck/backyard at that time.)

When we got in the car to drive to the next appointment, DH asked me, "Is there any reason why we would not want to make an offer on that home?" I was blown away because DH has not even been close to asking anything like that to me with anything we have seen up to this point. So we went to the next two houses and they were nothing like we were looking for so we talked to our realtor and discussed putting an offer on the first home we saw. Based on the listing price and the condition of the home, her feeling was that it would sell quickly so our best bet would be to try and get our offer in first. So she went home and wrote up the offer and sent it in. Then we were on pins and needles waiting to hear anything back. Since the next day was Sunday, we put the deadline for a response on Monday.

On Sunday after church, our realtor called us and said that the owners had received 2 other offers in addition to ours and they were all pretty comparable (although I think ours may have been the lower of the 3). Our offer was the first one in and the realtor for the sellers said that they felt really good about working with us and didn't want to get into bidding wars. They asked us to counter slightly higher and asked if they could rent back from us for two months. So we countered slightly higher and agreed to let them rent back until July 31 since that would give us time to get our home ready to sell and hopefully sold by then. Well, they accepted our offer and then it was a rush to make sure we could get the financing we needed and everything ready for the closing date 30 days away.

At this point everything felt like we were in a dream. We pulled aside M&M and Luke to let them know what was going on. DH started out by saying, "Well, it appears that we may have bought a house." To which M&M replied, "Wait, was it an accident?" DH and I busted up laughing at that! About a week after our offer was accepted, we almost backed out of the deal but after DH talked to a couple of coworkers, we decided to go ahead with it. Now comes the crazy part of getting our current home ready to sell!