Shhhhh…Be Very, Very Quiet…We’re Hunting Houses…

It’s been a very busy weekend.  I’d like to say that after my procedure on Thursday, I spend the whole weekend just puttering about my apartment, knitting, cuddling with the pets, and watching the squirrels, but my parents are currently on this cheerleading drive to get me to buy a house, so my mom and I went house hunting since she’s here.

Now, my plan had been to wait to go actually look at houses because I only have 2K in my savings and my current lease doesn’t end until April.  I thought I’d at least wait until January.  In fact, previous advice from my father had been to wait until January to start looking around.  But on their last visit a few weeks ago, every day they were here, they were forcing the Real Estate ads on me and picking up all the free flyers you find outside of restaurants and grocery stores and reading them to me while I was trying to get other things done.

It’s not that I don’t want to live in a house of my own or look for one, it’s just that the last time I went looking for houses, back in 2003, two bad things happened.  First of all, I found a house I really liked but didn’t have the money to put down on it right away because I was also trying to pay off my credit card debt and the owner who was someone I knew was trying to sell right away.  She sold it quick.  Second, I then got fired from my job.  So it was a good thing I hadn’t bought the house, but it took extra long to get that credit card debt paid off.

So, I’m debt free right now.  I just got a raise, but I don’t have enough savings to actually put down on a house, though my mother keeps telling me that my parents will give me 10K for the down payment.  She says that my father promised me that and I keep saying that he keeps forgetting little things like I paid off my credit card debt because he keeps asking me a year later if I have so I can’t imagine he remembers that big thing three years later — especially since the promise was only 3K (Houses in Maine cost a lot more than in Louisiana). 

Anyway, I didn’t really want to go look at houses this weekend because what if I saw “the perfect house” and I have no money to put down and my apartment  lease isn’t up until next April.  Then someone else will be living in it.  My mom said more houses will come along.  I told her that in the mean time that just makes me grumpy and annoyed.  It’s like window shopping with no money.  It’s unproductive and a waste of time.  She seems to think it’s important to see what’s out there.  I’ve already been in people’s houses all my life.  I already know what I want in a house.

But we went anyway.

The house we went to on Saturday is actually a co-worker/friend’s house.  She’s been trying to get rid of it for a while.  Quite literally, it is almost perfect.  The purple walls in the bedroom can be painted over.  However, the kitchen and the living room are a bit smaller than I would prefer.  The two most important rooms in my house are the kitchen and the living room and in that order.  Her kitchen has limited counter and cabinet, though the white and green linoleum is quite lovely.  Those could be dealt with by buying a rolling island that had cabinets underneath.  However, the real problem is the lack of dishwasher.  I absolutely love to cook but I absolutely loathe washing dishes.

The living room is small and my piano would unfortunately once again have to go in the dining room.

So, now I need to go talk to her about why she never put one in and if it’s possible and could she give me some measurements from her kitchen, etc.

There’s also a leak in the basement near the basement door to the outside which I would want checked out.

Her house is way back off the street which I like but in Winter that will require extra snow shovelling, which is a nasty thought.

The liveable square footage is only about 1100 sq ft. which is small.  There’s no place for my bookshelves anywhere except the one room on the first floor as the two bedrooms upstairs have slanted ceilings.

But there’s a one car garage with lots of storage that’s separate from the house, a garden shed, a large basement, washer and dryer hookup, large closet space in the master bedroom, secluded yard (can’t really see the neighbors or the road through the trees) for the puppy and my vegetable garden, 1 1/2 baths, hardwood in the dining room, carpet everywhere else (though I’m not excited about that or the type), and the wall colors except in the master are fine.  The house if 15 years old and she’s been the only owner.
Now we looked at three other houses yesterday but it seems like more because we were lost most of the time trying to find those houses.  We were supposed to see five.

The first one we saw was definitely not me, was priced higher than I want to pay and would have required way too much money to change things.  There was far too much wallpaper which would have had to come out before I could live there and the entire upstairs was panelled and dark.  It was very country.  And the kitchen was country blue…I mean the counters too.  It was very wrong for me.

The second one was still in the process of being built and might have been a good choice for me but it was going to be expensive and the builder was being difficult…like he didn’t want to include the cost of pouring a driveway or including a fence.  This house was right up on the neighbors and the street.  When I lived in New Orleans I literally could look out of my bedroom window into our neighbors kitchen window and see what they were having for dinner.  I swore I never wanted to live like that again.  Now that I’ve lived a little bit in the “country”, I like it.  I like seeing trees and squirrels when I look out my windows.

But the third house, I liked the look of immediately when we drove up.  It had the look of a red barn.  There were a couple of crab apple trees out front that you could tell would be beautiful to see in the Spring from the big window that was clearly the living room window.  Going inside, I almost immediately fell in love.  The whole first floor is hardwood or linoleum.  The sunroom, which is heated either by electric heat or by wood-burning stove, connects the garage to the house and acts also as the mud room.  It has tile.  The kitchen didn’t have any more cabinet or counter space but had a huge amount of floor space — I would buy a rolling island that also had a breakfast bar w/ stools.  The kitchen was painted white and two colors of green, had your usual fridge, stove, dishwasher and a built-in wine cooler/fridge.  There was a huge cut-away to the living room so you get all of that natural light from that huge front window.  Lighting in the kitchen was both recessed canned lights and hanging Tiffany lights.  There was a matching Tiffany sconce in the hall.

The first floor also has two small rooms with nice closets, a pantry/linen closet, a coat closet, and a full bath, painted with with silver fixtures and linen closet.  There was also a full unfinished basement with a sump pump and washer and dryer hook up.

My mother and I discussed the idea that the front small room could become the piano room and that I could put a small table with two chairs in there just for my chess set too and also my bookshelves and it could be my study.  How intellectual, yes?  And the other room would be my craft room/office.  Since I don’t do dinner parties too often, I can have the sun room be the dinning room and when I have dinner parties, I’ll heat the room with the wood stove.
The upstairs had a hall closet and two almost equally sized bedrooms with slanted ceilings and some drawers built into the walls and small closets.  No upstairs bathroom.  The owner said they were waiting on an estimate to have one put in — that would require raising the room and it would go where the hall closet is now.

A plus for this home is the hardwood stairs which is something I want and the Berber carpet upstairs — also a plus with me.  It’s 1600sq. ft.
OK The small closets upstairs are a negative as I like having lots of clothes.   It’s closer to the street than my friend’s.  This one was built in the 60’s, but it was recently renovated as the current owners are flippers.  The fact that the only bathroom is downstairs and I have to pee two or three times a night is a really bad negative.

My friend’s house and the other almost perfect house are both priced almost $220K.  My mom thinks I can talk both of them down — even if I get the flipper to add that upstairs bathroom.
*sigh* O.K. So I talked this morning to my apartment rental gal about my options.  Apparently I actually have a couple because I’ve been there a long time.  I can

1. Give no notice; move out over the weekend and show up one Monday and turn in my keys and write them a check for 1½ month’s rent, which she said most people just add into their mortgage loan.
2. Give some sort of notice like 30 or 60 days and while I’m packing up and cleaning up, they’ll market the apartment and hopefully someone else will want to rent it so I’ll only be responsible for the time between when I move out and when the new renter moves in.

Right now there are a lot of empty apartments in my complex.  There’s an apartment exactly like mine next door that’s been empty about a month.  So that option #2 doesn’t look good.

Checking mapquest the houses are about 16 - 18 miles from work.  The flipped house I’d have to take the turnpike in to work on at least some of the way.

And now the scary stuff…I have a couple of those How-To-Buy-A-House books but I don’t find them particularly useful.  I’m a first time home buyer.  So what’s the procedure?  I know you can get special loans or something for first time home buyers, can’t you?  Where do you look for those?  And isn’t there special help for first time home buyers with no down payment?  Should I apply for the loan first or make an offer first?  And then what?

I really just don’t know where to go from here and it scares the heck out of me.
God, I feel nauseated.

tags: house hunting

2 comments

1. on October 23, 2006 at 1:26 pm

   Tamara said:

   Wow, things are happening!

   Sorry I didn’t do the Friday Five First Sentences. I will get back on track this Friday, I promise!

2. on October 23, 2006 at 3:09 pm

   Tod said:

   How exciting! I loved looking at other peoples houses when we were looking. I’m so nosey.

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