A Lesson in House Hunting

M & J became interested in house hunting in the fall of 2009. After J’s graduation and Christmas, we decided to move from online searching to actual home showings. We tried out four places on the first day out and never would have guessed that one of them would be our future home.

One house was too smoky for our taste and not big enough. Nope.

The next two seemed like more logical options. Both in good locations, had lots of garage space, but had some work to be done and were listed at higher prices.

The last home was in a great location, but that was about the only “great” thing we saw that day. Torn up inside, only one full bath, lots of work to be done in every room and a HIDEOUS 18 inch back door that could not be overlooked.

After the first day, we were discouraged by the amount of work to be done in all of these houses and felt like we had lots to learn and were going to be sacrificing a lot to even find a house we would consider buying.

We went back to Manhattan and stalked checked out realty Web sites often to see if anything new was coming onto the market. Things got crazy for M in February when he started traveling frequently for work and then in March we lost his dad. At this point, it reiterated the fact that we should move back to Central KS and fast. Our lease ended in Manhattan in May, and if we wanted to avoid being homeless, we needed to act quickly. Little did we know – we’d have to go through attempting to purchase three houses before we’d land our first place.