Price Tag

We invite you to listen to the following and consider it a soundtrack to this post :)

Yesterday we received a copy our final closing paperwork to review and had the pleasure of going to the bank and getting the cashier's check for the closing!  We are signing the paperwork and paying our down-payment first thing Monday morning and now we are all prepared.  

The Appraisal and Moving Forward

 

Today we finally received the report from the appraisal company.  The report brought great news, confirming that the house is worth the price we are paying for it.  In fact, the price we are paying is slightly lower than nearby comparable sales, so that's good news for us!  This is also good news because we can now be confident going forward that we really are getting a new house!

Status Update

We are learning that this process is ever-changing.  Yesterday afternoon our real estate agent called to break the news that on top of the five major problems we already knew about there are no permits for the majority of the electrical work that was done in the house in 1992.  Essentially, this means that there is no proof that the electrical work was done to code and if we were to have an electrical fire this might be a problem for insurance purposes.  This is a major problem because we need to seriously consider the possibility that the electrical wiring is a fire hazard and that in order to be completely sure that it is safe we would need to have the entire house rewired.  As you can imagine, this would not be an inexpensive undertaking.

Inspection Aftermath

So, as we mentioned yesterday, we really needed the inspection to go well.  And did it?  Sort of.  For a 101 year old house, it went very well.  The roof and structure are both in excellent shape.  The electrical and plumbing have been updated and are in reasonably good shape.  However, there were five major issues that will need to be dealt with immediately or in the near future:

Speaking of Resale Value

Okay, so we've been feeling a little bad in the past couple days about all this talk about resale value. The very nice couple who were the previous owners of our pending house accepted our offer because we are going to live in the house.  We believe that they received many offers, some possibly higher, some possibly cash, but they wanted to pass it on to a young couple who could love it as well as they did.  They are giving us the opportunity to live in their beautiful long loved and lived in home and here we are talking about resale value.

The truth is, we really are looking for a house to live in for the next five or so years and we never would have felt right if we didn't find something that we really loved, regardless of the resale potential.  After all, no matter how much money we might make off any given house in the end, we still have to live in it in the meantime.  Remember our needs vs. wants list?  Here are a few things we were committed to (to one extent or another) for personal reasons:

How Quickly Things Change...

We've been going back and forth a little bit about whether we risk jinxing it by posting about our newest development just yet... but we think that this is an important part of the process and that's what this blog is supposed to be all about, so we decided to share:

On Friday we put an offer in on a house and we found out yesterday that our offer was accepted!  We signed the paperwork this morning, and scheduled an inspection for Wednesday so if all goes as planned we are on our way to home ownership!

Our real estate agent emailed us the listing on Friday morning and we got out to see it right away because she was sure this house was perfect for us and that it would not be on the market for long.  She was right that it was perfect, so we put in an offer right away.  We knew there would be other offers so we decided to offer the full asking price for the house.  Yesterday afternoon we found out that our offer had been accepted.  It turns out that the couple who was selling the house had lived there for 60 years and they were excited to sell it to a young couple looking for a home rather than investors offering high prices and cash so that they could turn around and sell the house for a better price.  Lucky for us!

The One That Got Away

Now that we're in serious house hunting mode we've been checking listings with our real estate agent every day to watch for any new houses to come on the market.  On Sunday morning this lovely house popped up in our listings:

Not only was it a good-sized and good looking house,  it was right smack in the middle of Hollywood, our first choice neighborhood!  What's more is it was the first house that we've seen in our price range in Hollywood in the three months we've been watching the listings.  We knew that in order for a house to be priced this low in this area it must need a lot of repairs, so the question was just how much.

Scoping Out Neighborhoods

Tomorrow we're going out to visit a few of our favorite houses with our real estate agent!  To get a better idea of which houses we want to visit we've spent the last two afternoons driving around the neighborhoods where our favorite houses are located.  It's amazing how much you can learn about a house just by walking by it.  As a result of our afternoon adventuring we've actually knocked two of our favorites to the bottom of our list, confirmed a few of our previous assumptions about certain houses and surprisingly moved a few houses we weren't really considering to the top of our list.

Update - Meeting with our Agent!

Here's one place in Portland we won't be looking at houses:

As you know, we met with our new real estate agent for the first time on Wednesday!  We really liked her and are excited to work with her!  She is incredibly knowledgeable about real estate and about houses and she loves to work with first time home buyers and share that knowledge.