Yesterday, we went out with our Realtor, S. She'd sent us a list of 6 homes to look at (with pictures and all of that jazz) and we liked 3 of them. We had actually looked at the other 3, from the road before we'd even contacted S, and they were beautiful but had issues like right on a major route, too close to those big electrical lines (hello cancer) and the last one had a weird yard--too tilted and we do get our fair share of rain around here, and no one wants a flooded basement!
We decided to take a look at the three that were remaining. All of them fit our needs in regards to square footage, acreage, age of house, town, so we figured why not?
Two were duds, one was awesome. The first one was dirty and smelly, plus the owner's cat BIT ME, when I reached out to let him/her sniff me before I attempted to pet it. Can only imagine what would happen if I'd just pet the cat! The property was also set into a hill and we didn't want that. The house itself was pretty decent, but the driveway was all torn up and would have needed to be resurfaced. No thanks.
The second one was cleaner, but very unsafe. Rickety back stairs off of the deck, which was brand new, so hopefully they were going to be doing new stairs, next! The front stoop had holes in the concrete (WTF) and when S was showing us out, she instinctively put her hand down on the railing and it almost gave way. Lovely. The inside was nicer than the first one, but it shared similar driveway/yard issues.
Both of these homes said they were on over an acre of land. You could NOT see this, and S wasn't sure where the property lines were either. Very sad. I think S felt badly about taking us to see these. They weren't her properties and she had the codes for the lockboxes and knew nothing about them.
So we go on to the third house, which was very clean, both on the inside and out. New windows, updated kitchen, immaculate carpets (which were almost 20 yrs old, but you'd never know). FLAT YARD (yay!) but the selling agent is there and tells us that there was an offer on the property this morning. Boo. It wasn't a house we were totally in love with, but we would have liked to keep it in our options. S was happy that there were NICE things out there and weren't misrepresented!
Hopefully we'll be looking at some more, soon. I meet with the bank tomorrow to start the mortgage process.
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4 comments:
the good thing is that you have an idea of what you want. when we were looking for a house we probably spent a few weeks just going to open homes on sundays to get an idea.
Yeah, we haven't gone to too many open houses, but we'd done a lot of driving around, seeing what's out there. At least what we saw (even the crappy ones) were in-line with what we were looking for...
Good luck with the house hunting!!! Reflecting back now, I wish we had spent a little more time doing it. I am dealing with a big issue now of being on a "busy" street. We did not know this since we bought our house in the winter, it's like the Indy 500 in the summertime. I am about to begin the process of getting both the police and the town involved because of the people that "drag race" down our block. I almost lost my shit on a teenager who blew the stop sign and almost hit me with Matthew in the car yesterday. Just another tip to ask about, especially if you are planning on having kids ;).
Thanks! We definitely want to be in before the winter because we don't want to move in the cold weather and you can't do an inspection with snow on the ground (yay New England). We also are not looking at any yellow lined streets since they are busier. I think it's different where you are vs. the neighborhoods around here.
(Did you change your "handle"?)
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