A quick trip to Philly

With all the stress of home buying going on I decided on a whim about a month ago (I love that  this counts and on a whim for me) that I wanted to go “home” to Philadelphia to see my two best friends Kate and Sarah. As you might recall, Kate’s wedding was this July. We went up to Philly for the first time together and Mr. A got to experience the full force that is Philadelphia. Note as a reminder is as effing 121 with heat index in the church where Kate got married. NOT COOL, literally…

So this trip was much lower key. I wanted to meet Sarah’s new little baby Brycen and I wanted to spend some good quality time with both of them before I was going to bogged down with house projects this summer. I knew that spending money on a ticket up there with all the expenses of home buying was going to seem nuts. So I just bought a ticket before I owned a home officially!

Friday I spent the day hanging out with Sarah and baby Bryce in their home. We walked to Main Street in Manyunk and had lunch and then made dinner with her husband and drank wine on their porch overlooking the city. We talked about their move to the Boston area they will be making later this summer (I can’t believe they will not be in Philly anymore) and all the home choices they have to make. The weather dinner and company were just what I needed to relax and enjoy. It was perfect start to the trip.

Yummy salad Sarah made for dinner. I must make this.

 Saturday we got up and had breakfast at their house and chatted more about all of the house stuff going on with them and Mr. A and I. Sarah also gave me a whole run down on the whole birth process, which BTW, I want to give birth just like she did now. We then walked down to Main Street again to get a mani/pedi. This was the first one Sarah had had since getting pregnant! It was so great to see her relaxing and getting to have some fun girl time with her. He husband, Gian, took the baby and headed to a sports bar with the baby bijorn in tow. It was so cute. Here is a picture of the two of them!

Sorry I know this is sideways... So cute though.

I will figure out how to rote tate this. But this is Sarah and Gian walking back to their house in the city. So pretty.

Shortly after coming back from mani/pedi time Kate arrived at Sarah’s house and the three of us headed to dinner. We went to this super cute Italian place that serves you olives and cheese when you sit down. Yes. I know. Amazing. Sarah is a rock star mommy and brought baby Bryce with her. It was so cool to see how much she has grown into a wonderful mom! She just chatted and hung out with us while Bryce hung out. The three of us caught up over a glass of wine. I can’t believe that we have known each other for a decade now! It was just a perfect night.

Proof about the olives and cheese. So yummy.

I got my WAWA run in while in Philly. This is a necessary stop on every trip back home.

After dinner, Kate and I headed to her house. Note: when Kate and I are left alone things tend to get very out of control quickly. Kate and I started the night with a glass of red wine and a chat and me saying, “I am pretty tired”. Before I knew it we had gone through 3 bottles of wine!!! I know… we are awesome, you are jealous. Her husband, the state trooper, left for work at 5 am. We were still sitting on her back porch chatting. He told us to go to bed and that we looked like a hot mess. We did not turn in until 6am. Hey, when you only get a little time together you have to make the most of it.  And we really did!

Sunday we woke up and headed over to a local bar to watch the Flyers game. I know nothing about hockey so I chose to instead nurse my hangover with more beer. Because you know, that is how you get rid of a hangover right? After the game was over we headed home and watched game of thrones and chatted. I loved just getting to “hang out” at their house. Usually when I am in town we are always doing something special so we never get to just relax and spend time together. It was really a perfect end to a super fun mini vacation to Philly.

Sunday funday at the bar in Philly. Watching the Flyers!

Trying to stay positive

I had written a whole post giving you all the nitty gritty of what is going on with the house. It was my (what seems to me usual) bitch fest about home buying and how much it sucks. And it was super Debbie downer.  Then I had to drive up to the doctor’s office and came back to read it one more time before I posted, and I realized how stupid it sounded. I need to cut that out and realize we are pretty lucky. We have lots of great friends and family, a great dog, and an awesome REALTOR who will help us find a good home. The whole thing will fall into place, just is not happening the way I had imagined it. But that is the same case with our wedding, and life in general!

Mr. A and I have been at each others throats throughout this process. Whether it is something legitimate like how much we should spend on a home. Or something stupid like what hose we should buy. We are growing up and learning a lot about each other in this process. Right now it is easy to focus on the negative, so for today at least I am going to focus on the positive. The happy thoughts of when we get into a house and can start decorating it how we want. Another positive is having a partner to go through this with. When we found out we might be losing the house I had a shoulder to cry on. It is amazing. So although we don’t agree on the hose we should buy in the end we are on the same team.

So to give you the latest in a none bitchy way, here we go. We are still waiting. We have been waiting for about 4 days now on the rebuttal. I don’t really know what is going to happen with it. The sellers have offered to pay for a second appraisal. I am hopping if we come close enough to a number we can agree on we can negotiate some sort of a deal. In the meantime, we extended our lease and started looking at houses again. It was rough to go back to looking again, I am not going to lie. But to good thing is we still have time, and we have a great support structure to help us through this whole thing.

Home buying is not for the faint of heart ladies and gentlemen!

Womp Womp...

A huge bump in the road was hit last night and now we might not be getting the house.

Turns out there are more hoops to jump through than ever to buy a house. Many of these have nothing to do with your skills in negotiation or your willingness to throw money at the issue. No. This bump in the road my friends is the appraisal.

Do you want to know what an appraisal is? Because I sure know a lot more about them than I used to. An appraisal is the process that you must go through in order for your loan to be approved by the bank. It is how the bank verifies that the loan you about to take out is not going to be for more than the actual value of the home. In the old days (circa 2008) when you got an appraisal the appraiser would be hired by the financial institution to go figure out if the home is worth what the buyer said they were willing to pay for it. What was happening was the appraisers were kind of “in bed” with the lenders. They were possibly bumping up the value of the home in order to ensure that the loan would go through, even if the house was not worth that. So what happened was when those people who paid for more than what the house was worth back in 2008 went to sell in 2010 they were upside down on the value of their house and could not sell. Now they are in foreclosure. Now life sucks.

Fast forward to 2012. Now when you go to have an appraisal done on a house the appraiser is hired by what they call an AMC. These AMC’s (appraisal management companies) are separate from the financial institution and therefor keep the appraiser from being “in bed” with the banks and there for not bumping up the value of the home in order to just close the deal. Well this new protection worked. It worked so well in fact that now our loan might not go through because the appraisal came back $13K less than our offer on the house.

So what do we do next? We wait? Our REALTOR has sent the seller’s agent a copy of the appraisal and told them they have to come down $13K in order for us to close. This issue is we know that the sellers will be upside down on their loan if they do this. We don’t think they will. And we think that they might end the contract, and we will have to walk away from the house. After all of this we still might lose this house. This SUCKS!

I will have an update hopefully tomorrow. The sellers are mulling it over as we speak.

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.