Here We Go Again!!!

What a mess! You just aren't going to believe this, but we're back to house hunting again!

Here's what happened in a nutshell....

Its Monday and we're 4 days away from moving into our new house! We were SOOOOO excited!! The next step was to sign the final papers and then the house was all ours!! YAYYY!!! Right? WRONG! It turns out that while we were waiting for the bank that owned our house to return paperwork to us (22 days waiting!!!!), two houses on the same street sold for a LOT lower prices than our agreed price. Our lender wouldn't lend more than the new appraised value of the house. So we went back to the bank that owned our house and explained what happened and man, were they not happy!!! They were SO angry about the lower appraised value of the house and absolutely refused to lower their price. So here we are, TeeJ and I, stuck in the middle of this battle and neither side was moving. Both sides so adamantly refused to budge that, as much as it broke our hearts to do, we had to walk away from the house! We both cried for days!

So, here we are back at the beginning, square one. We've spent this whole week looking at available houses again. Its been so tiring! So we started out with 61 houses that were in our price range and met our very basic criteria. We're looking for 4+ bedrooms, 2.5+ bathrooms and over 2,500 sq ft house. After eliminating all the houses that were over $400K, we moved on to the yard.

I can't really find the words to explain why, but having a big yard is just SO important to me. So we eliminated all the houses on less than 7,500sq ft lots. That left us with 22 houses. Not so bad. Three days this week, after we were done work for the day, we took off for Tracy and looked at the outsides of these houses. Some we eliminated because they were on busy streets, some because of the neighbourhoods, some because the house was in such sad shape that it would take too much time and too much money to fix up. We'd really like something that is pretty much move-in ready.

So, this morning we met with our realtor and had a list of 11 houses we wanted to see the inside of. She went thru and told us which ones were already sold, which were short sales (too long to explain, but we don't ant to get into a short sale situation) and which ones had offers accepted on them. That left three houses.

In his whole process, I had one house that was my favorite. It was my favorite when I saw it online (it had everything I wanted), it was my favorite after seeing it outside the first time (which, by the time we got there, was after 10pm). LOL It was pretty funny, TeeJ and I were out there with flashlights trying to assess the yard, the condition of the house, the neighbourhood and we could barely see anything! But it was fun!

So we went back to see all of that again in the daytime. That was yesterday and I have to tell you that the house took my breath away! The front yard is beautiful, the house is amazing and the neighbourhood is fantastic!!!

So this morning we went to see it inside for the first time and we were like kids in a candy store! It has EVERYTHING we wanted on our "Must Have" list! It has everything we wanted on our "Nice To Have" list and it even had a couple things on our "In Our Dreams" list!!! WOOHOO!!!!! We brought the girls with us to see it and they were SO excited!

Before we were even done looking, we asked our realtor to put in an offer. Cross your fingers for us! Say a prayer! Send me your ghosts (inside joke, ask me about it if you want!)!! We want this house!!!!!

I did this wrong again, the pictures are at the top. LOL I'll figure this blog thing out someday!!!

More to follow!

Joanne