I’ve Got Two Words For You

And they are not “I do.”

How about:

Pending.

Inspection.

You know what that means, right? We found a house, put an offer, and are in mutual acceptance.

We went out house hunting Saturday, excited to see one house in particular that had come back on the market after buyer financing failed. After seeing a few duds, we arrived at this particular house and spent time walking around talking about the pros and cons. We hung out for a while in the kitchen/living room area almost trying to convince ourselves that we liked it. I mean, we DID like it but it wasn’t winning us over. We left to look at a few more houses, still pondering why we weren’t sold when it looked so good “on paper.”

We saw another house that had a lot of promise- spacious and upgraded with a view of Mount Rainer from the front porch but we didn’t like the neighborhood that much. We drove on to see another in a part of town we keep being drawn back to. There are a lot of houses for sale in this ‘hood and while it’s a bit far from any hub of coolness, we like the suburbaness of it. It’s about fifteen minutes on the freeway from downtown and about that far from my mom’s house and my sister’s house. The commute to work would increase for both Darcy and I but we anticipated that. There is no way we could afford a house in any of the closer downtown Seattle neighborhoods unless we had $100,000 more and were willing to buy a 2 bedroom (which we tried looking at but didn’t like).

So all this is to say that we walked into this 1954 house located on a corner lot and went WOW. Everything had been upgraded. There were hardwood floors, new carpets, two fireplaces, a stainless steel/granite kitchen and 4 bedrooms. FOUR! Plus two living rooms. The yard needs help- it has this terrible dog run that looks more like a cage and part of the fence needs to be replaced if we were to get a dog. The front has possibility for lots of planting and even the concrete backyard has promise. It’s good to have some projects to plan for, right?

Living room #1

We left there knowing we wanted it. After discussing it with our agent and broker, we put in an offer on Easter for the asking price. Yesterday, the sellers countered and we agreed to the new terms (we’re folding in $4000 to our loan amount to cover closing costs). They had another offer that didn’t ask for closing costs to be covered but since we got our offer in first and our agent wrote a cover letter that impressed them, they gave us dibs.

Upgraded kitchen (that isn't my dream kitchen but I can live with it until we can make some changes to it)

We’re at the top of what we want to spend but it’s do-able. We decided to put only 5% down instead of 10% because with the wedding and having to furnish a 4 bedroom house, we’ll need some cushion and with the 10% option we were worrying about being capital B Broke. The inspection is scheduled for Sunday so we should know more then. It’s all moving very fast but that’s how it goes with house buying. We have spent so many hours looking for houses and driving around that it’s hard to believe this is actually happening. But it is!

Well hello house!

Keep your fingers crossed for us, ok?

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