We moved!

Hey all!

Mr. A and I have moved into our new house! It is awesome to be homeowners and have a space that is all our own. Becuse we are having so much fun learning (and breaking things) in our house we have decided to write a blog together about the house and our lives. So I am going to say bye bye to this blog for now.

If you are interested in sticking with me check us out at our new blog: http://mrandmrsandersonshouse.blogspot.com/

It is just getting started so keep checking back with us. We are going to renovating our house and eventually growing our little family there! We can't wait to keep sharing our journey with anyone who is interested!

Plus let's face it, I am not really an ex-Yankee anymore! Thanks so much for all the fun, I hope to see you all on the new blog!

Closing and Opening

Last night at 4pm we became homeowners!

Our key!!!!

It was a whirlwind of the last few weeks and we have been working so hard to get all the last minute arrangements and paperwork taken care of. I have never felt so overwhelmed by paperwork in my life. In the end though it was totally worth it because we got a house!!!!!

I am going to just give you a rundown of all the stuff we needed for closing and some of the highlights (or lowlights if you want to be a negative Nancy) of our process.

First we had the appraisal issue. The house did not appraise originally for our agreed purchase price so we had to send in a rebuttal to the AMC who then came up only 2K after two weeks of waiting to hear from them. So the seller’s agreed to pay for a second appraisal as I had mentioned the second went through. This whole process delayed our closing by almost two weeks. This really threw a wrench into our whole plan.

When you close at the end of the month you do not have to pay as much in taxes. It is hard to explain but we ended up asking for the lender to give us a refund on this month’s taxes so we could close on May 3^rd instead of the end of the month. They did and it was not a big deal but we did totally get the shaft on getting a “free” month of mortgage payments like many realtors tell you you will get your first month. FAIL. But at this point we do not care because we just wanted to close.

After we got all the paperwork lined up we headed to the title company and signed a million papers. Seriously, my hand cramped up at one point. I suggest you also try to schedule your closings early in the morning. What happens is now with all the changes to the industry the banks require all money is transferred before you get keys. It is totally not like house hunters when you get the keys at the closing table anymore. LAME. And if you close at the end of the day you will not even get the keys until the next day because they don't have the time to process everything! We had prepared ourselves for yet another home buying dream bubble burst while signing away our lives.

Lucky for us our RELATOR is awesome and she was able to procure a key for us last night anyway. She rocks my face off.  So after lots of waiting we finally headed over to our new home!!!! We closed the door on renting and buying a home we are opening another into the world (the very scary and overwhelming world) of home ownership.

On our way to the house we went home and picked up our puppy and then headed over with a car full of cleaning supplies and paint stuff. NO time to waste in this project. We move in in two weeks and we need to paint the whole house!!!!!

So here are the fun pictures from our first night in our new home. We drank champagne and ate pizza in sweats as we threw the ball for our dog in the backyard. It was a perfect night really.

Bubbles from our REALTOR waiting for us when we got home!

Harry is one happy dog in his new home!

Our first meal in our new home. It was glorious!

Harry playing ball in his new backyard. I know it is a blur, but I totally love this picture!

An update on our house drama...

Up until late last night I was going to post a blog about how we have moved on from what we thought was going to be our first home. We had heard back on the rebuttal that the seller’s agent submitted to the appraisal management company, and the value of the home only came up $4,000 not the $13,000 that we needed to close the deal. We had really just given up and moved on from the house. 

On Monday we went and looked at a bunch of new houses on the market that had potential. There were some better than others but none of them worked for us as well as the house we were about to lose. To give you all a perspective of how desperate we have become, we were seriously considering a house at the top of our price range that had no windows in the master bedroom, and was outside of the neighborhoods we wanted to be in! Seriously, NO WINDOWS! There was another house in the neighborhood we love, at the VERY TIP TOP of the price range, and still needed to be gutted. Oh and the owners were smokers so the house smelled like total ass. So needless to say things were just progressing horribly. 

Then we went to the house we were trying to buy with our REALTOR. Mr. A had said he needed to see it again to remember why we had liked it so much. We walked in and his face just lit up again. It was like we knew this one (even more so than the first time) was going to be our first home. Just at that time a person walked into the house. It was an appraiser! The sellers had not even told us, but they had ordered a second appraisal! So we kept our fingers crossed that this second appraisal would come through. 

Up until last night we still had not hear anything. We just waited. So we went to look at yet another house. A super overpriced, but super cute house in our neighborhood. I was ready to make a low ball offer on the house and just move on totally from our first home. I sent our RELATOR home to call the sellers and see if they would work with us. 

We got a call from our REALTOR around 6. I was thinking it was about the overpriced house. No, it was about our house… 

The house appraised!!!!!! HOLY CRAP!!!! The lender is going to accept the second appraisal!!! HOLLY CRAP!!!! We are going to get our house!!!!!!! 

After all of the waiting and complaining and waiting some more… WE ARE GETTING OUR HOUSE!!!!!!!!!!

We have a bit more paperwork to do, but we should be closing by the end of the month. We can’t believe it but we are going to get our home!!!! 

I can’t wait for closing day!!!! More to come when we know it!

These people know more about me than my parents

We are in the final stages of applying for our home loan and let me tell you this process sucks monkey balls. I have killed more trees in the last week than I care to share and I have had to make more personal phone calls about my 401k programs than trips to Target this week, not cool man not cool. A short list of things you will need tp provide to your loan officer includes: passport, drivers license, other ID All your bank accounts and full statements All of your retirement accounts All other investments All your work history Three years of tax returns W2 from the last three years Your dogs name Color of your mothers car Okay the last two are fake, but the rest is legit. I am sure there are more things I forgot. Oh and you have to fill out this huge application. It's like your are asking for a million dollars. I guess in our case a million dalliers is the same a 200,000. Oh well. Once we have this all wrapped up we have our appraisal and then we should be ready to go to closing. April 25th can't come soon enough!

And the winner is...

I know I said I would get right back to you about what house we chose. I am so sorry it has taken me forever to get back to you on this. I had a few people pick both houses actually! In the end we picked option number ….. 

Wait for it....

ONE!!!! 

We bought the first house! The deal is done! We could not be more excited to move into our cute new home with our dog and start making improvements!  

To give those of you who have never bought a house the break down here are the phases of the process we have gone though: 

1.       We put in an offer. First you sign a bunch of contracts with your agent and figure out what price you want to offer. In our case, there were three other offers coming on the house. So we knew offering less than asking was out of the question. To our REALTORS advice we also opted not to ask for concessions for closing costs. She thought this would give us more room for negotiations on the house for repairs after our inspection and she was right.

2.       You wait. You wait for the seller to get back to you. In our case they got back to us about 24 hours later. They countered with a few changes and after Mr. A got pissed off that we were not getting a deal (even though we were getting a house for WELL under our budget) we settled on the details. Sometimes you need to know when you have found a good deal for you.

3.       You wait some more. You wait while your realtor and their realtor drum up all the paperwork on the offer and you sign away again.

4.       Inspection. We have what in Texas is called an 7 day “option period”. Basically what this means is we give earnest money to the sellers of $100 so they will not sell the house to anyone else, while we got the inspection done. We had 7 days to get it done, and get cracking on asking for repairs. Two days after the offer was accepted we had our inspection done. (more on this later)

5.       Negotiations on repairs. After we tabulated all the repairs that the inspector suggested we had our REALTOR ask the sellers for about $2600 in repairs. They basically laughed at us and said they would do $750… they suck. We settled on $1000 in repairs with them also having an electrician come out and fix all of the issues with the electrical system. So with that it worked out to be about $1500 in repairs. So BAM done.

6.       Final Contract and amendments. We signed away on our final negotiations, including getting that totally bad ass picnic table you see in the listing, and signed the final contracts today! Woot Woot! 

So there you have it. We are now out of our 7 day option period and the house is ours (mostly). We still need to get to closing. We gave them an escrow check and are closing on April 25^th! In a month Mr. A, Harry and I will be closing on our first house! I am so pumped up right now! 

Now we get to the fun stuff… picking paint colors to cover up that horrible red wall and possibly paint the fireplace! Who’s with me!?

We are buying a house!!!!

Dude what happened!? This is the feeling I have right now. The last 72 hours have been a total whirlwind. I can’t believe I am saying this but we are UNDER CONTRACT right now! We are sooooooo excited I can’t even begin to tell you all.

Let me start at the beginning of this whole story and give you a play by play on how we found our new home!

About 10 days ago we got notice that our house came on the market. At the time we were still not over the house we lost in Crestview and were not really ready to accept that we were not going to be able to afford the neighborhoods we were stressing out to look in. On top of the houses were selling so fast, or they were going above asking price. So even if we thought we might be able to afford a house we would be out bid by someone else. We thought we were in for the long haul on this but as I mentioned before this whole home buying process had started to kind of suck. So when the house we are now buying came across our emails we dismissed it pretty quickly even though our REALTOR has suggested we take a look at it. Ironically she was totally right.

Fast forward to Sunday. Nothing had come on the market really at all. And I was not really doing much on the house search really. I just did not want to end up finding a house we loved that was out of our price range and doing something crazy. So this past Sunday I got my car washed and ran some errands. While waiting for my car to finish up I stated to screw around on my REALTOR.com app on my phone. Using the map feature I was able to hone in on the area we liked. Two new listings that I had not seen came up in the search. I looked at the pictures and both had lots of promise and best of all were in our price range! So then I noticed that they were both having open houses right then. So just as my car finished drying, I headed over to the open houses to check them out. I did not even tell Mr. A or have my REATLOR with me. Just thought I will knock these two off my list and keep waiting.

I have found that the camera can be super deceptive so even though these looked good on my phone, I had no excitement that they would be good in any way. So I headed up to this neighborhood, which is further out from town than we wanted, but still a great location. It was doable to me to compromise on the neighborhood to get the house we wanted.

I walked into the first open house and the REALTOR was standing there waiting for me. He was super nice, but to be honest knew jack shit about the listing. Clearly he was just covering the open house. This house was also clearly a former rental, and then an investor came in and spruced it up a bit. But I was just not feeling it. For those who are curious here is the house I am talking about: http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/11715-Shoshone-Dr_Austin_TX_78759_M84227-37783

Then I hoped over one block and pulled up to our house. It was totally adorable and cute from the outside, so I of course thought that there was for sure going to be something wrong with it inside. When I walked in I was pleasantly surprised. It was super cute. Vaulted ceilings, good living space and flow. I got super pumped at this point. I called Mr. A right away, who was at SXSW film festival and told him I wanted him to see this place. After talking to the REALTOR on site she informed me that the house actually already had a cash offer on it. This house had been on the market 10 days, WTF!? I called our REALTOR and got her to make an appointment to see the house at 8am the next morning. I was not going to loose out on this house dammit.

Then in a  twist of fate… a third house in the same neighborhood just a few blocks away listed. It was the same size and open concept, just slightly different layout. We called our REALTOR and she booked a showing for that house at 8:15 the same morning. So we headed over bright and early the next morning.

Here are the links to the two homes. I want you to tell me which one you thought we picked! I will tell you all about the negociations and contracts tomorrow when I reveal the house we picked!

1. http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/Austin_TX_78759_M81227-58837

2. http://www.realtor.com/realestateandhomes-detail/5004-Powder-River-Rd_Austin_TX_78759_M86260-08427

Gut Check Time

I wanted to write about this sooner but I was not emotionally stable until today so I am going to give you a recounting of making our first offer on our first home. Spoiler alert: I end up a sobbing mess.

Mr. A and I made an offer on a house this past Sunday! Woot woot! Now I am sure you are wondering what the house looks like and all of that so here is the link: http://austinhomesearch.com/Search/Details.aspx?li=289381&or=1&cp=1 Please, I will wait while you judge…

Back to our story, 6 weeks ago when we started looking at houses we NEVER would have given this house a chance. It has very few of our required items, sold as is (which means if there is something wrong the seller will not fix the house) and it has yellow Formica countertops. Come on, this house on paper was a joke. But we decided to give it a chance because it had great light and square footage and was within walking distance to one of our favorite restaurants/margarita joints.

It was listed on MLS on Saturday and we go to the house Sunday morning at 930am, and the bitch already had a full price offer on it. Seriously. I know. So we proceeded to check it out and realized there were SO MANY great things about this house. The best of which was although there was a lot to do, we could totally live in the house while we fixed it up. It was a perfect situation for us. So we proceeded to head home and talk numbers. When we first thought of a number, we thought we could do full price plus maybe about $5K. Our REALTOR advised us that the house was priced WELL under market value and that we should go in with our best and final offer. So after crunching numbers and taking a walk around the neighborhood we would be buying in we came up with an offer of $11 over asking price, all closing costs paid by us, and a 45 day closing. We thought that was a pretty damn good offer.

All day Monday we obsessed over the house. We thought about changes we want to make, where our furniture would fit and how much fun it was going to be to take on this project. We nervously waited all day as our REALTOR submitted the offer. There were a total of three offers made on the house. All of them more than asking. We knew it was going to be close. At 9:30pm we got the call.

There is nothing worse than being told you did not get the house that you have now fallen in love with. Our REALTOR said it was really close, but could not tell us what the deciding factor was. I went from the high of researching DIY videos to the low of crying on my sofa cell phone still in hand in disbelief that we did not get the house. $11K over asking and we still did not get the house!??? Seriously!? I thought this was supposed to be a buyers market! I guess that aint the case in Austin people. I wanted to blame someone but there was no one to blame. Just the overwhelming feeling of disappointment. Mr. A and I both just hugged each other and sat in silence for a good while as we let the loss wash over us.

So after a few days of mourning that loss, I am picking myself back up again and we are on to look at more houses. I am still not over that house, it feels like I got dumped right now and I am looking for a rebound.  Inventory is so low, and there are tons of buyers out there just like us, so we are going to be acting fast and offering aggressively and find a house to rebound with. We are not messing around anymore. Gut check time.

List Baby List… List Baby List…

Everyone here remember the “Tootsie Roll” song? Now sing the title of this post to that song… Dip Baby Dip… Awesome. 

Anyway back to what I meant. Mr. A and I have now been officially looking for a house for about 6 weeks, unofficially I have been looking for a house for over a year. Heck let’s be honest I have been looking at houses to buy since I started my career in the Real Estate field 5 years ago. I obsess over new listings, and up until late last year felt that there were almost too many great options. 

Fast forward to today. I am at a loss. There seems to be a conspiracy amongst sellers. They are all holding off their listings. There is CRAP on the market right now. Other than the first two homes that we had found promising, and the house that got away (still a sad panda about that one BTW), there is just nothing out there.

We have looked a few other stray houses here and there. We have been unsuccessful at even making an offer on a house. Mr. A has become SUPER picky about every house we look at, worst of all he is picky about things that I could care less about. Like the infamous, “yea, but where do I put my TV” or “my sofas don’t fit in this living room” and all I can think about is, we will get a new sofa, or we will figure out a way to watch TV I am sure of it. I care about location and location and maybe an updated kitchen at this point, but that is not even a deal breaker.

Mr. A I believe is trying to make me happy by agreeing to look at smaller houses in the area I like but in the end I always wind up heartbroken because our frigging sofas won’t fit… Really!? I have since told him I want him to stop wasting my and our REALTOR’s time. I know he wants the perfect first home as well so I am trying not to freak out on him all the time when he acts like that. But Grr.

So really, the reason I am writing this post is not to bitch about my sweet husband, but to bitch about sellers. COME ON PEOPLE MOVE!!!!! I know you want to list your adorable house in the perfect neighborhood at the best price ever today! List baby List, so I do not freak out on my husband. I want to find a house already dammit!

This is really starting to blow, just in case you could not tell.

Just because we all like to look here is the link to the house with the small living room that I like but he does not like: http://austinhomesearch.com/Search/Details.aspx?li=287947&or=1&cp=5

This is what happens to your hair after a month of house hunting

Check out my grey!!

I went grey super young actually. I am going to get all of this covered up tonight though. Don't worry, I am not a total mess just yet!

My first house hunting heartbreak

Well I had a really crappy house hunting experience this weekend. How about you? Nothing? Oh well then I am jealous of you all.

As mentioned in my previous post I was all excited about a new house that came on the market like Tuesday or Wednesday. I did not let on how pumped I was about the house, but let me tell you I was. This house was totally awesome and one of those that I would have had to it when we moved in houses. All the colors, the layout, the kitchen, the yard, all of it was just what I/we wanted. 

Sunday we planned to go to the open house with our REALTOR. We got dressed and as we were heading out the door, we got the text from hell. The house went under contract. Not taking backups. It was gone. Never even got a chance to find out if I really loved it or not, never will know if it was perfect or not. It will just never be an option. And like that I started to cry. It was the most indescribable feeling. Like someone had just ripped a piece of your favorite desert out of your hands after you cooked it, decorated it, planned a party for it and planned out where all your furniture would go in it,  started to take a bite. Just sucked. It was the first time I had loved a house that much and just like that I had to just get over it. It is so sold; it’s not even on MLS anymore.

So there you have it. I am heartbroken. First time home buying not so much fun. 

Then I got in the car with the funniest lady ever, Kelly, who at 8 months pregnant is even funnier. She informed me that “fun” is not the word she would describe home buying. She told me that that is bull shit and fun is not the word she would use. She said it sucks and I should just get used to it sucking. But that there is hope, that one day a house will come on the listings and I will race over to see it and just know that it’s the house for me. And we will find our first home. I needed to hear that. I needed to know I was not cray cray for crying over this house. 

So now I know. Home buying is going to be full of highs and lows, and although more tears are in my future for sure, I hope they are more happy then sad.

On to the next house…

We will not compromise (just yet)

 Y’all, we are still looking for a house. Y’all this is really stressful and scary. Y’all, I am not going to let the stress/scariness get to me! I will not give up on the “dream house.”

So to catch you all up here is where we stand. We had two houses we liked. But after not being able to decide if either were worth compromising on, be decided neither were worth it… just yet at least. 

 

One house we were going to have to knock down a wall and live in very tight quarters, and the other house as cute as it was had some updating that needed to happen and a kitchen that needed to be moved around quite a bit. Both of these factors were making it really difficult to be happy and totally pumped about either house. And that is when a light bulb went off! We don’t have to compromise (just yet)! We have time to look for more houses! We have four months before our lease is up, and we can be a bit picky. Don’t they say that it is a buyer’s market right now? Well if that is the case we should be able to find lots of great options, without having to compromise on much. We both really want a perfect house for our future family and neither of these was perfect. Since we have time we concluded it might be worth it to see if that perfect house is out there.

Just as soon as we made that decision a new house came on the market that is totally adorable. We are going to look at it this weekend. It is still not totally perfect, but it reminded us both that there are going to be more options, and possibly options with less compromising. We have the luxury of not having pressure and I think it will behoove us to wait and see if there are better houses out there. 

It reminded me of when I bought a wedding dress. Talk about scary. That was, other than my car, the most expensive single thing I have bought. I was terrified I was going to make the wrong choice. I felt rushed and pressured because I had my mom and sister with me. I bought a dress in one weekend. It was on sale, and it was absolutely stunning, and I do still love it. But could there have been better buys out there? Could there have been better dresses out there for me if I have not let the stress and pressure get to me? I am sure of it. I will never know though. From that experience I am trying to grow and learn. This time I have done research, I will know every angle and I will not have any pressure. This is supposed to be fun right?

So getting back to the fun I wanted to recommend some great websites I have been stalking for home décor, organizational, and furniture inspirations: 

Houszz.com – This website has like a million pictures of all sorts of fabulous homes. You can search by room, décor, style pretty much anything you want and you can “pin” your items on to their boards or your Pintrest board. This brings me to my next: 

Pintrest.com- In case you live under a rock, this is the new(ish) website where you pin all your ideas and inspiration on to your categorized boards. I love it. 

Younghouselove.com – I love me some John and Sherry home décor on the cheap.

Hope you guys all feel inspired like I do. I will let you know when I know when we have found the perfect home!