entryway

When you walk in the back door to our new house, this is what you see. (Minus the rag doll).


Walk in, turn the corner, and look back and you see this:


Because this is the main entrance M and I will use, we need someplace to put our coats, take off boots, etc.

Here are some ideas I've found:

I like the tall bookshelf for all the mittens, hats, etc.

Here's another idea from Martha Stewart

We're going to be homeowners!

We had inspectors in, signed a lot of addendums and revisions, but it is finally going to happen. The sellers fixed what needed to be fixed, and we are closing this week. We should have the keys soon.

We are so excited and have been having house dreams all weeks.

yet another bump in the road

We hit another bump in the road. We had the general home inspector to see the house, and he had some major concerns about the foundation and support.

1. The foundation walls might be bowing in. It's impossible to tell for sure because the waterproofing goes up the whole wall, so you can't see it. But you can feel a bulge and see that the wall isn't straight.

2. Some of the floor joists are cracked, split, and rotted out. In fact, when you step on the floor above, you can feel it move a little.

Because the wedding was 3 days after this inspection, we decided to just put it on hold, while our realtor and the sellers find structural engineers to come out and give their opinion.

Offer made and accepted!

The Sunday before our wedding we had an appointment to see this house in Northfield Village. I wasn't crazy about the neighborhood, but M drove by and said he thought I'd really like it.

The minute we drove up to it, I knew I wanted it! We had talked about possibly making an offer if we liked what we saw inside, because we sure liked the outside, and the description sounded like exactly what we were looking for.

We went inside and were pretty impressed. Big, renovated kitchen. Hard wood floors. Wood trim. New windows. Built in 1925, which is about the age of home I wanted.

And the outside is charming. There's a big wrap around porch that spans three sides of the house. Two-car garage, and a shed. And lots of "mature landscaping" as the listing says. It really looks like a summer cottage.



So we went back to our agent's office and wrote out the offer. The next day we found out they accepted it, and we scheduled a house inspection to be done before our wedding.

Bump in the road

After we made our offer, we anxiously waited everyday for the seller to call us back. She had seemed ok with the price when we verbally made the offer. So when M finally got to talk to her, she hemmed and hawed about waiting on her lawyer, and waiting for other offers. This was two weeks after we made the official offer.

Later that week her lawyer writes up an agreement and faxes it to me at work. To me it is an affront to everything we’ve sent her. It’s a completely new agreement, says none of the things we wrote in on our offer, and has her original price listed, $30,000 more than we wanted to pay.

When M sees the offer he calls her and says this is not at all where we want to go and she blames her lawyer for filling it out wrong. At this point M tells her he’s not sure if we even want to pursue this anymore. It’s been 3 weeks since we put in an offer. She says to talk it over with me and let her know if we want to withdraw our offer.

We talked it over and decided we don’t really want the house for a number of reasons. I really wanted a pre-WWII home, this one was built in the 50’s. There’s a lot of work to be done to the wet basement, and electric work. The house is a ranch, and it’s on a busy street. And the seller doesn’t want us to work with a realtor, she wants us to her with her and her lawyer. There’s no way we’re going into this just on our wits alone. We’d have to hire a lawyer or retain our realtor out of our own pocket.

In the end we weren’t comfortable compromising so much for a house we weren’t in love with and withdrew our offer.

Made an offer

We decided to make an offer on the ranch from my last post. We are offering about $30,000 less than her offering price, because it needs a lot of work, including the basement which has been very wet each time we've been over.

The woman is selling the house For Sale by Owner as part of her grandfather's estate. She doesn't wants us to deal with her lawyer, no realtors, but of course we need someone experienced on our side, so we are working with our realtor.

Now we begin the waiting game!

Another prospect, Sagamore Hills

M and I are thinking of putting an offer on this ranch in Sagamore Hills, Ohio. He looked at it a couple weeks ago and I got to see the inside this weekend. It was built in 1955 and has all kinds of 50's features inside. Tons of kitchen cabinet and countertop space.

It has two bedrooms, a big laundry room, and another room which could be a bedroom but feels more like a rec room. It's on a nice one acre lot.

You can tell from the picture that it needs to be painted. It needs flower boxes in the windows too. There's lots of overgrowth, but that's mostly cosmetics.

A real possibility

I came across the listing for this house:


Isn’t it charming? It is located in Hudson, Ohio, just off the main square. M called up our real-estate agent and set up an appointment for us.

It is not our ideal house, only two bedrooms, one-car garage, small yard. This forced us to discuss what our priorities really are.

Our ideal house is:
older with lots of character (even a fixer upper)
affordable (our max price is $150,000)
in a great neighborhood
3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms
on a nice size of land
2 car garage

Of course we realize that we’re going to have to compromise somewhere. In the case with the Hudson house, we’d forgo the 2-car garage and get by with 2 bedrooms because it is such a desirable neighborhood and charming house. It would certainly be a "starter" house.

We went to look at the house on a Saturday morning. It's even cuter in person. Definitely an old house, with almost no straight or level lines. But we liked it enough to bring my parents back to the official open house the next day. There were some issues, a couple trees will have to come down before they fall down, and some dirt is poorly leveled in the back that will certainly lead to drainage problems.

The owner is asking more than our max price, but we let our agent know we were very interested. M talked to her about our concerns and she talked to the other agent. He said there’s been a lot of interest, and the listing price ($169,900) was actually about $20,000 lower than what the owner wanted, so he’s probably not willing to take an additional $20,000 hit!

We’re not willing to go in over our heads so we didn’t make an official legal offer.

But we now have a better idea of what is important to us, and we have a potential color scheme for whatever house we end up buying! ;)

Preapproved!

Let’s start at the beginning.
- M and I are getting married in just over a month, and we are trying to buy a home.
- We work in cities about an hour apart from each other, so we are looking for something in between.
- We live in Northeast Ohio.
- We have a real estate agent, but do most of our own searching online and driving around.

The biggest latest step for us was talking to a broker who got us a preapproval letter. So when we find that house, we’ll be able to close the deal.

Follow our journey through the home-buying process.