Property Virgins

Maybe our first round of house hunting was less House Hunters than it was Hidden Potential (where people buy inexpensive houses and then use the remainder of their budget to remodel). We really, really liked the idea of doing this and hopefully will someday, but we realized that it just wasn't going to work out this time around. We were hoping to get a special kind of loan that allows you to roll the renovation costs into your mortgage so you don't have to pay the higher intrest of a remodel loan, but this didn't work out because we would need upwards of $45k to fix/remodel House #2 (which was way, way more that we thought it would be) and the limit on the remodel part of the loan is $35k. Also we found out that you can't do any of the work yourself (which knocked out House #1--we could have paid $15k to do some of the work ourselves and make it really cute, but a contractor would be much more expensive and not cost effective). So, since renovating isn't currently an option (without paying as much as we would on a finished house), we're going to have to buy something we want to live in without messing with it.

This is the part where Sandra Rinamato would say, "You're such property virgins" and point out that we're going to have to up our budget if we're going to get what we want. Which is fine--we looked at the numbers and figured out what would work for us. Unfortunately, that basically means we're starting over.

At this point our realtor is probably really torn about our feelings for us--she hates us because she's already shown us a bunch of houses, and now we want to see more (a LOT more), but she likes that we're upping our budget, which means more money for her. Poor woman. She must have such inner termoil.

My hope is that we find a house that, as one of my Facebook friends said, "will have light shining from the sky all around it." And that we can find it this week and finish this up. Because they don't show the part on House Hunters where you are dreaming, talking, thinking houses 24/7 (not as fun as it sounds), and you and your husband are in a deadlock about which house to pick, and all the while you are terrified that someone else is going to come along and snatch up your perfect house (yes, I still worry about this in a down market in the middle of Southwest Georgia).

I'll keep y'all updated n' junk and hopefully our next post will be My First Place!